SoilClass: A Novel Image Dataset For Soil Classification
Keywords:
soil types, soil classification, CNN, Deep LearningAbstract
Soil classification is one of the most important topics in the field of agricultural development. It plays a vital role in agricultural, environmental science, and geotechnical engineering, and it helps in soil tillage, crop selection, moisture level estimation, and automation. Soil classification using conventional and laboratory methods is time-consuming, expensive, and requires a high level of skill. This study describes a quick and cost-effective method for predicting soil types using soil images. To create the soil image dataset, a total of five types of soil samples were collected from different parts of West Bengal. Later, the collected samples are tested with the help of the soil testing laboratory, West Midnapore, West Bengal, India. Later, we created an imaging setup and captured a total of 552 images of these five categories of soils from different angles and various light conditions. We used five CNN models, namely, MobileNetV2, InceptionV3, ResNet152, ResNet50, and DenseNet201 for the soil classification task. In our dataset, DenseNet201 and InceptionV3 achieved the highest accuracy, and ResNet50 achieved the lowest accuracy.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Bishal Chakraborty, Soumik Pan, Arunita Das, Krishna Gopal Dhal (Author)

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