A Modified Watershed Algorithm for Rice Plant Growth Stage Analysis

Information technology plays a crucial role in enhancing various sectors, including agriculture. In particular, technological advancements in crop monitoring are essential for sustainable food production, where accurate growth analysis is vital. Image-based approaches have emerged as a promising tool for assessing crop growth, particularly in rice plants. This study aims to enhance rice plant image segmentation using an improved Watershed algorithm, integrating the Laplacian operator and Distance Transform. This study utilizes a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier for segmenting and classifying rice plant growth stages, achieving accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics. The dataset consists of 1080 images of rice plants, with 74 images used for training, 31 for testing, and 975 images for validation. The image processing pipeline involves preprocessing steps such as grayscale conversion, normalization, color segmentation, Otsu thresholding, filtering, and edge detection. Following preprocessing, the Watershed algorithm is applied in two scenarios: the conventional method and the enhanced method with the Laplacian operator and Distance Transform. Performance evaluation is based on accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics. The results show that the enhanced Watershed algorithm significantly outperforms the conventional method, achieving an accuracy of 99.58%, precision of 80.55%, recall of 79.92%, and an F1-score of 81.50%. While there is a slight imbalance in precision and recall, the model demonstrates reliable performance in identifying rice plant growth. This study confirms that integrating the Laplacian operator and Distance Transform into the Watershed algorithm significantly improves segmentation accuracy, supporting the development of automated monitoring systems in smart farming. Furthermore, this approach opens avenues for application in other crops and diverse environmental conditions.