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Remarkable progress has been made in applying deep learning models to distinguish between weed and crop species within agricultural settings. Still, a significant gap persists in the body of work on how models are trained and evaluated when environmental conditions diverge. The dominant tendency involves either dividing a single dataset distribution into training, validation, and test splits or first pooling datasets originating from varied conditions or distributions and then partitioning them. What our study brings forward is an effort to close this gap: we incorporate multiple broadleaf weed categories spanning dissimilar distributions, probe what happens when convolutional neural networks are trained exclusively on condition- or distribution-specific data, and then gauge their behaviour in entirely foreign environments across three experimental setups. By surveying an array of network designs alongside distinct learning modes (fine-tuning versus feature extraction), testing multiple architectures, adopting varied training protocols, and consolidating data, we arrived at straightforward guiding principles that ensure models retain precision and accuracy even under starkly contrasting deployment conditions. Experiment 1, confined to a single uniform environment, produced accuracies of 80%–100% across models and strategies; fine-tuning yielded higher accuracies (94%–99.9%) than feature extraction (80%–92.96%). Experiment 2 showed a steep drop-off in performance: whenever the test partition came from sources other than the training and validation sets, accuracy ranged from 25% to 60%, most often around 40%. Experiment 3, centred on merging datasets and distributions, delivered encouraging numbers — ResNet in fine-tuning mode attained a high of 99.6%, whereas InceptionV3 in feature extraction mode dropped to a low of 69.9%. These core insights underscore that fusing data from mismatched distributions, paired with fine-tuning on modern backbones like ResNet and MobileNet, markedly improves capability, unlike the comparatively modest outputs of leaner architectures such as AlexNet. Our results suggest that accepting data heterogeneity and flexible training regimens are fundamental to sharpening weed classification pipelines. The study provides a workable approach for handling diverse datasets that reflect genuine agricultural variability.

The tractor functions as a fundamental power source for farming activities. Still, the available power is frequently not fully exploited because of poor matching between the tractor and the attached implement under actual field conditions. To improve overall system productivity, it is essential to gather information on performance-related variables characterising the tractor-implement unit. In this work, we build a real-time Instrumented Tractor Performance Monitoring System (ITPMS) that leverages the Internet of Things (IoT). The hardware foundation comprises a Raspberry Pi, a GPS sensor, a proximity sensor, a rotary potentiometer, and a three-point hitch dynamometer. The rotary potentiometer records tillage depth, whereas the three-point hitch dynamometer captures draft force values. Proximity sensors are mounted on a two-wheel-drive (2WD) tractor to measure forward speed and drive-wheel slip. A dedicated web server is set up within a Google® Firebase® project, allowing storage of data streams from all sensors via the Raspberry Pi. Alongside this, a web interface and a mobile application are constructed to present the sensor-generated data in real time. Field experiments were conducted to assess and observe the performance variables of the tractor-implement unit employing the built ITPMS. The findings reveal that the system can reliably monitor the performance variables required for the tractor-implement unit. Furthermore, the system’s ability to transmit updated information to the IoT server without delay is verified. Altogether, designing and deploying this Raspberry Pi–centred IoT framework provides a trustworthy and effective approach for real-time performance monitoring of instrumented tractors.