Detecting Hogweed on the Ground-Level View Photographs: Dataset

Hogweed (Heracleum) is a herbs genus that features many invasive species such as giant hogweed or Sosnowsky's hogweed. This invasive species are particularly notorious due to the high content of phototoxic compounds, so that any contact with a plant may result in an intense skin burn.

Invasion of the Sosnowsky's hogweed [lang:RU] in particular is major trouble in Central Russia, and by 2021 resolving the problem requires massive intervention. Agtech drones spraying herbicides are already used to eradicate the Sosnowsky's hogweed, and accompanying real-time detection algorithms for UAVs are being developed (e.g. see this paper and the related dataset repository).

We propose a dataset for detecting Sosnowsky's hogweed using the ground-level view as if we're looking through the camera of an autonomous unmanned ground vehicle patrolling the hogweed-endangered area (e.g. a week after mowing or poisoning). It is not 100% clear whether this dataset can or should be used for training actual robotic vision algorithms or synthetic datasets construction. However, plant detection in the natural environment is quite a challenge, which makes such annotated images collections suitable for competitions and/or ML homeworks. This is a grassroot (pun intended) initiative without any external funding.

Data

Photographic images for the directory prepared_data/images/ (CC-BY-4.0) can be downloaded from Zenodo: 5233380.

444 (311/133) photos are taken in different locations in Russia using a Samsung Galaxy A31 camera. The images are annotated using https://supervise.ly/ (CE).

A more detailed description of the data collection strategy and the dataset in general will be released during autumn. Test set annotations will be released after the end of the competition.

Format

The annotations are provided in COCO format. To inspect the annotations manually, please see the Jupyter notebook COCO-formatted-annotations-viewer.ipynb adapted from the original Gist shared by akTwelve.

Classification

To train a classifier,

1. run a get_data.sh script,
2. check out the Dataset object provided in dataset.py if you are planning to use PyTorch,
3. consider using a baseline implemented in prepared_pipeline_for_transfer.py -- based on a fine-tuned ResNet18 model prepared by Dustin Franklin @dusty-nv. The training process is described in the tutorial. The model is available for downloading. All rights are reserved by NVIDIA.

How to cite

We would appreciate if you cite this dataset as

@dataset{alekseev_anton_2021_5233380,
  author       = {Alekseev, Anton},
  title        = {{Detecting Hogweed on the Ground-Level View Photographs: Dataset}},
  month        = aug,
  year         = 2021,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {0.1},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.5233380},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5233380}
}

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Aleksey Artamonov, Andrey Savchenko and Mikhail Evtikhiev for various consultations and proofreading.

Other materials

• A monster that devours Russia [YouTube video]
• Different species, similar threat: Giant Hogweed - The UK's Most Dangerous & Toxic Plant [YouTube video, possibly disturbing content]