Streamlining Crop Segmentation with Multispectral Imaging and Foundation Models: Minimizing Manual Annotation

Deep learning advancements have significantly enhanced computer vision applications in precision agriculture. While RGB cameras operating in visible light are affordable, they provide limited information compared to multispectral equipment. This research analyses methods to reduce the need for manual annotation when training a model using only RGB images, without compromising the model's accuracy. We propose a semi-supervised approach where a teacher model, trained on multispectral images, generates artificial ground truth data to train a student model that operates solely on RGB images. This strategy has enabled us to achieve nearly a tenfold reduction in the required training data while maintaining similar performance metrics. Additionally, we explore the potential of segmentation foundation models to simplify the manual annotation process, reducing the need for full segmentation masks to just bounding boxes. Our findings also indicate that using multispectral images as input for the Segment Anything Model is more effective than using RGB images.