Attention-aided lightweight networks friendly to smart weeding robot hardware resources for crops and weeds semantic segmentation

Weed control is a global issue of great concern, and smart weeding robots equipped with advanced vision algorithms can perform efficient and precise weed control. Furthermore, the application of smart weeding robots has great potential for building environmentally friendly agriculture and saving human and material resources. However, most networks used in intelligent weeding robots tend to solely prioritize enhancing segmentation accuracy, disregarding the hardware constraints of embedded devices. Moreover, generalized lightweight networks are unsuitable for crop and weed segmentation tasks. Therefore, we propose an Attention-aided lightweight network for crop and weed semantic segmentation. The proposed network has a parameter count of 0.11M, Floating-point Operations count of 0.24G. Our network is based on an encoder and decoder structure, incorporating attention module to ensures both fast inference speed and accurate segmentation while utilizing fewer hardware resources. The dual attention block is employed to explore the potential relationships within the dataset, providing powerful regularization and enhancing the generalization ability of the attention mechanism, it also facilitates information integration between channels. To enhance the local and global semantic information acquisition and interaction, we utilize the refinement dilated conv block instead of 2D convolution within the deep network. This substitution effectively reduces the number and complexity of network parameters and improves the computation rate. To preserve spatial information, we introduce the spatial connectivity attention block. This block not only acquires more precise spatial information but also utilizes shared weight convolution to handle multi-stage feature maps, thereby further reducing network complexity. The segmentation performance of the proposed network is evaluated on three publicly available datasets: the BoniRob dataset, the Rice Seeding dataset, and the WeedMap dataset. Additionally, we measure the inference time and Frame Per Second on the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX embedded system, the results are 18.14 msec and 55.1 FPS. Experimental results demonstrate that our network maintains better inference speed on resource-constrained embedded systems and has competitive segmentation performance.