Soybean crop yield estimation using artificial intelligence techniques

It is common to observe conventional methods for estimating soybean crop yields, making the process slow and susceptible to human error. Therefore, the objective was to develop a model based on deep learning to estimate soybean yield using digital images obtained through a smartphone. To do this, the ability of the proposed model to correctly classify pods that have different numbers of grains, count the number of pods and grains, and then estimate the soybean crop yield was analyzed. As part of the study, two types of image acquisition were performed for the same plant. Image acquisition 1 (IA1) included capturing the images of the entire plant, pods, leaves, and branches. Image acquisition 2 (IA2) included capturing the images of the pods removed from the plant and deposited in a white container. In both acquisition methods, two soybean cultivars, TMG 7063 Ipro and TMG 7363 RR, were used. In total, combining samples from both cultivars, 495 images were captured, with each image corresponding to a sample (plant) obtained through methods AI1 and AI2. With these images, the total number of pods in the entire dataset was 46,385 pods. For the training and validation of the model, the data was divided into subsets of training, validation, and testing, representing, respectively, 80, 10, and 10% of the total dataset. In general, when using the data from IA2, the model presented errors of 7.50 and 5.32% for pods and grains, respectively. These values are considerably lower than when the model used the IA1 data, where it presented errors of 34.69 and 35.25% for pod and grain counts, respectively. Therefore, the data used from IA2 provide better results to the model.