Wearable Vision-Based Plant Identification System for Automated Pasture Monitoring in the Mediterranean Region

Effective and sustainable livestock management within Mediterranean ecosystems depends heavily on accurate and timely monitoring of sward composition. Traditionally, this task has relied on human observers who must traverse large and often rugged areas to identify the distribution of grasses, legumes, shrubs, and other plant groups. However, this approach is not only labor-intensive and slow but also susceptible to substantial human error, especially when observations must be repeated frequently or carried out under difficult field conditions. In the present study, an alternative method that integrates wearable cameras with modern computer-vision techniques to automatically recognize pasture plant species through an edge device present in farm premises was investigated. Additionally, the feasibility of achieving reliable classification performance on resource-constrained edge devices was evaluated. To this end, five widely used pre-trained convolutional neural networks were compared against a lightweight custom model developed entirely from scratch. The results demonstrated that ResNet50 delivered the strongest classification accuracy, achieving a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.992. Nonetheless, the custom lightweight model proved to be a practical compromise for real-world field use, reaching an MCC of 0.893 while requiring only 6.24 MB of storage. The inference performance on Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 5, and Jetson Orin Nano platforms was also evaluated, revealing that the Selective Search stage remains a major computational limitation for achieving real-time operation. The results obtained confirm the possibility of implementing a plant identification system in agricultural facilities without the need to transfer images to a cloud-based application.