A Rapid and Highly Efficient Method for the Identification of Soybean Seed Varieties: Hyperspectral Images Combined with Transfer Learning

Convolutional neural network (CNN) can be used to quickly identify crop seed varieties. 1200 seeds of ten soybean varieties were selected, hyperspectral images of both the front and the back of the seeds were collected, and the reflectance of soybean was derived from the hyperspectral images. A total of 9600 images were obtained after data augmentation, and the images were divided into a training set, validation set, and test set with a 3:1:1 ratio. Pretrained models (AlexNet, ResNet18, Xception, InceptionV3, DenseNet201, and NASNetLarge) after fine-tuning were used for transfer training. The optimal CNN model for soybean seed variety identification was selected. Furthermore, the traditional machine learning models for soybean seed variety identification were established by using reflectance as input. The results show that the six models all achieved 91% accuracy in the validation set and achieved accuracy values of 90.6%, 94.5%, 95.4%, 95.6%, 96.8%, and 97.2%, respectively, in the test set. This method is better than the identification of soybean seed varieties based on hyperspectral reflectance. The experimental results support a novel method for identifying soybean seeds rapidly and accurately, and this method also provides a good reference for the identification of other crop seeds.