INoD: Injected Noise Discriminator for Self-Supervised Representation Learning in Agricultural Fields

Perception datasets for agriculture are limited both in quantity and diversity which hinders effective training of supervised learning approaches. Self-supervised learning techniques alleviate this problem, however, existing methods are not optimized for dense prediction tasks in agricultural domains which results in degraded performance. In this work, we address this limitation with our proposed Injected Noise Discriminator (INoD) which exploits principles of feature replacement and dataset discrimination for self-supervised representation learning. INoD interleaves feature maps from two disjoint datasets during their convolutional encoding and predicts the dataset affiliation of the resultant feature map as a pretext task. Our approach enables the network to learn unequivocal representations of objects seen in one dataset while observing them in conjunction with similar features from the disjoint dataset. This allows the network to reason about higher-level semantics of the entailed objects, thus improving its performance on various downstream tasks. Additionally, we introduce the novel Fraunhofer Potato 2022 dataset consisting of over 16,800 images for object detection in potato fields. Extensive evaluations of our proposed INoD pretraining strategy for the tasks of object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation on the Sugar Beets 2016 and our potato dataset demonstrate that it achieves state-of-the-art performance.