Abstract:

: Pests are always the main source of field damage and severe crop output losses in agriculture. Currently, manually classifying and counting pests is time consuming, and enumeration of population accuracy might be affected by a variety of subjective measures. Additionally, due to pests’ various scales and behaviors, the current pest localization algorithms based on CNN are unsuitable for effective pest management in agriculture. To overcome the existing challenges, in this study, a method is developed for the localization and classification of pests. For localization purposes, the YOLOv5 is trained using the optimal learning hyperparameters which more accurately localize the pest region in plant images with 0.93 F1 scores. After localization, pest images are classified into Paddy with pest/Paddy without pest using the proposed quantum machine learning model, which consists of fifteen layers with two-qubit nodes. The proposed network is trained from scratch with optimal parameters that provide 99.9% classification accuracy. The achieved results are compared to the existing recent methods, which are performed on the same datasets to prove the novelty of the developed model.

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