SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ESTIMATING VEGETATION COVERAGE IN A REAL-WORLD ENVIRONMENT

Computer-implemented method and system (100) for estimating vegetation coverage in a real-world environment. The system receives an RGB image (91) of a real-world scenery (1) with one or more plant elements (10) of one or more plant species. At least one channel of the RGB image (91) is provided to a semantic regression neural network (120) which is trained to estimate at least a near-infrared channel (NIR) from the RGB image. The system obtains an estimate of the near-infrared channel (NIR) by applying the semantic regression neural network (120) to the at least one RGB channel (91). A multi-channel image (92) comprising at least one of the R-, G-, B-channels (R, G, B) of the RGB image and the estimated near-infrared channel (NIR), is provided as test input (TI1) to a semantic segmentation neural network (130) trained with multi-channel images to segment the test input (TI1) into pixels associated with plant elements and pixels not associated with plant elements. The system segments the test input (TI1) using the semantic segmentation neural network (130) resulting in a vegetation coverage map (93) indicating pixels of the test input associated with plant elements (10) and indicating pixels of the test input not associated with plant elements.