TRANSFORMER NETWORKS TO CLASSIFY WEEDS AND CROPS IN HIGH-RESOLUTION AERIAL IMAGES FROM NORTH-EAST SERBIA

The intricate backgrounds present in crop and field images, coupled with the minimal contrast between weedinfested areas and the background, can lead to considerable ambiguity. This, in turn, poses a significant challenge to the resilience and precision of crop identification models. Identifying and mapping weeds are pivotal stages in weed control, essential for maintaining crop health. A multitude of research efforts underscore the significance of leveraging remote sensing technologies and sophisticated machine learning algorithms to enhance weed management strategies. Deep learning techniques have demonstrated impressive effectiveness in a range of agricultural remote sensing applications, including plant classification and disease detection. High-resolution imagery was collected using a UAV equipped with a high-resolution camera, which was strategically deployed over weed, sunflower, tobacco and maize fields to collect data. The VIT models achieved commendable levels of accuracy, with test accuracies of 92.97% and 90.98% in their respective evaluations. According to the experimental results, transformers not only excel in crop classification accuracy, but also achieve higher accuracy with a smaller sample size. Swin-B16 achieved an accuracy of 91.65% on both the training and test datasets. Compared to the other two ViT models, the loss value is significantly lower by half, at 0.6450.