Can the Segmentation Improve the Grape Varieties' Identification Through Images Acquired On-Field?

Grape varieties play an important role in wine's production chain, its identification is crucial for controlling and regulating the production. Nowadays, two techniques are widely used, ampelography and molecular analysis. However, there are problems with both of them. In this scenario, Deep Learning classifiers emerged as a tool to automatically classify grape varieties. A problem with the classification of on-field acquired images is that there is a lot of information unrelated to the target classification. In this study, the use of segmentation before classification to remove such unrelated information was analyzed. We used two grape varieties identification datasets to fine-tune a pre-trained EfficientNetV2S. Our results showed that segmentation can slightly improve classification performance if only unrelated information is removed.