Camera apparatus and method of enhanced foliage detection

A method of foliage detection, comprising:

• in a camera apparatus:
• acquiring an input color image of a field-of-view (FOV) of an agricultural field;
• generating a first binary mask image from the input color image of the FOV of the agricultural field, wherein the first binary mask image comprises one or more foliage masks indicative of a presence of one or more foliage regions in the FOV with a first accuracy level;
• applying one or more morphology operations to remove noise in the first binary mask image;
• identifying one or more image regions that meet a defined criteria to be considered as foliage;
• and
• generating an output binary mask image of foliage mask based on the applied one or more morphology operations and the identified one or more image regions, wherein the output binary mask image of foliage mask is indicative of the presence of one or more foliage regions in the FOV with a second accuracy level greater than the first accuracy level;
• setting at least the generated output binary mask image of foliage mask as a ground truth during training of a custom neural network model in a training phase to obtain a trained custom neural network model;
• and
• operating the trained custom neural network model to detect one or more other foliage regions in a new color image captured by the camera apparatus in a real time or near real time in an operational phase.