Deep Learning-Based Method for Classification of Sugarcane Varieties

The classification of sugarcane varieties using products derived from remote sensing allows for the monitoring of plants with different profiles without necessarily having physical contact with the study objects. However, differentiating between varieties can be challenging due to the similarity of the spectral characteristics of each crop. Thus, this study aimed to classify four sugarcane varieties through deep neural networks, subsequently comparing the results with traditional machine learning techniques. In order to provide more data as input for the classification models, along with the multi-band values of the pixels and vegetation indices, other information can be obtained from the sensor bands through RGB combinations by reconciling different bands so as to yield the characteristics of crop varieties. The methodology created to discriminate sugarcane varieties consisted of a dense neural network, with the number of hidden layers determined by the greedy layer-wise method and multiples of four neurons in each layer: additionally, a 5-fold evaluation in the training data was composed of Sentinel-2 band data, vegetation indices, and RGB combinations. Comparing the results acquired from each model with the hyperparameters selected by Bayesian optimisation, except for the neural network with manually defined parameters, it was possible to observe a greater precision of 99.55% in the SVM model, followed by the neural network developed by the study, random forests, and kNN. However, the final neural network model prediction resulted in the 99.48% accuracy of a six-hidden-layers network, demonstrating the potential of using neural networks in classification. Among the characteristics that contributed the most to the classification, the chlorophyll-sensitive bands, especially B6, B7, B11, and some RGB combinations, had the most impact on the correct classification of samples by the neural network model. Thus, the regions encompassing the near-infrared and shortwave infrared regions proved to be suitable for the discrimination of sugarcane varieties.