MSFCA-Net: A Multi-Scale Feature Convolutional Attention Network for Segmenting Crops and Weeds in the Field

Weed control has always been one of the most important issues in agriculture. The research based on deep learning methods for weed identification and segmentation in the field provides necessary conditions for intelligent point-to-point spraying and intelligent weeding. However, due to limited and difficult-to-obtain agricultural weed datasets, complex changes in field lighting intensity, mutual occlusion between crops and weeds, and uneven size and quantity of crops and weeds, the existing weed segmentation methods are unable to perform effectively. In order to address these issues in weed segmentation, this study proposes a multi-scale convolutional attention network for crop and weed segmentation. In this work, we designed a multi-scale feature convolutional attention network for segmenting crops and weeds in the field called MSFCA-Net using various sizes of strip convolutions. A hybrid loss designed based on the Dice loss and focal loss is used to enhance the model’s sensitivity towards different classes and improve the model’s ability to learn from hard samples, thereby enhancing the segmentation performance of crops and weeds. The proposed method is trained and tested on soybean, sugar beet, carrot, and rice weed datasets. Comparisons with popular semantic segmentation methods show that the proposed MSFCA-Net has higher mean intersection over union (MIoU) on these datasets, with values of 92.64%, 89.58%, 79.34%, and 78.12%, respectively. The results show that under the same experimental conditions and parameter configurations, the proposed method outperforms other methods and has strong robustness and generalization ability.