Soil Texture Prediction Using Machine Learning Approach for Sustainable Soil Health Management

Abstract

Soil in the earth acts as a foothold for all crops. Soil texture is the most important soil health indicator being used for the selection of crops, mechanical manipulation, irrigation management, and fertilizer management. The texture of the soil influences the storage and flow of air and water within the soil, as well as root development, the accessibility of plant nutrients, and the activities of different microorganisms. These factors collectively impact the soil's fertility, quality, and soil health. A conventional method of soil texture analysis is cumbersome, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. Machine learning (ML) is a newly emerging technique being used to assess the soil's physical, chemical, and biological properties quickly in real-time. This is an eco-friendly approach since it does not involve any hazardous chemicals. Machine learning can learn complex features and predict nonlinear properties. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) employs convolutional layers to automatically learn features from the input data and is widely used in image classification, object detection, and image generation tasks in a short time. Soil texture images are given as input dataset after the completion of image subsetting, data preprocessing, and Image augmentation. This gives a CNN-based soil texture predictive model with a reliable accuracy of 87.50% at a lower cost.