US Patent 11085156 Weeding systems and methods, railway weeding vehicles

A weeding system for a railway weeding vehicle comprising a camera and a spraying unit with several supply modules, a nozzle and a controller module to receive a weed species detection signal and to command the spraying of chemical agent. The weeding system also comprises a weed species identification unit with a communication module, a memory module and a processing module having several parallel processing cores. Each parallel processing core performs a convolution operation between a sub-matrix constructed from nearby pixels of the image and a predefined kernel stored in the memory module to obtain a feature representation sub-matrix of the pixel values of the image. The processing module computes a probability of presence of a weed species from the feature representation matrix and generates a weed species detection signal.