Deep Learning-Based Detection for Early Germination Stages of Chili Pepper (Capsicum annuum L) Seedling in Greenhouse

Nursery plays an important role on starting chili cultivation, determining the crop health, fertility from disease, and growth performance. Early-stage germination detection is necessary to minimize nursery failure and improve plant health, but manual detection is challenging for large scale nursery in the greenhouse. The aim of this research was to develop an automatic detection model integrated with a You Only Look Once (YOLO) based deep learning algorithm using RGB camera to monitor the chili germination stages. Method to detect germination was YOLO with several steps, included: (1) early stages chili germination images acquisition, (2) datasets preparations, (3) dataset annotation and labeling, (4) model development using deep learning YOLO algorithms, and (5) model testing and validation. The training of 11,423 images was conducted utilizing the YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 algorithms, which categorized into, three classes (germinated, not germinated, and cotyledon appearance). The model was evaluated using mean Average Precision (mAP), precision, accuracy, and recall with the respective values of 0.697, 73%, 75%, and 73% for YOLOv8, and 0.664, 70%, 73%, and 70% for YOLOv5. Both model achieved high accuracy, but YOLOv8 was better to detect and classify chili seedling growth stages than YOLOv5. This study also demonstrated that model can be implemented in real applications integrated with automatic monitoring system included in the model. Keywords: Chili seedling, Deep learning, Detection system, Germination.