Combining Canopy Coverage and Plant Height from UAV-Based RGB Images to Estimate Spraying Volume on Potato

Jingxin Xie, Zhongrui Zhou, Hongduo Zhang, Liang Zhang and Ming Li
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Jingxin Xie: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha 410128, China
Zhongrui Zhou: School of Agricultural Engineering and Food Science, Shandong University of Technology, Zibo 255049, China
Hongduo Zhang: Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan
Liang Zhang: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha 410128, China
Ming Li: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha 410128, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 11, 1-15

Abstract: Canopy coverage and plant height are the main crop canopy parameters, which can obviously reflect the growth status of crops on the field. The ability to identify canopy coverage and plant height quickly is critical for farmers or breeders to arrange their working schedule. In precision agriculture, choosing the opportunity and amount of farm inputs is the critical part, which will improve the yield and decrease the cost. The potato canopy coverage and plant height were quickly extracted, which could be used to estimate the spraying volume using the evaluation model obtained by indoor tests. The vegetation index approach was used to extract potato canopy coverage, and the color point cloud data method at different height rates was formed to estimate the plant height of potato at different growth stages. The original data were collected using a low-cost UAV, which was mounted on a high-resolution RGB camera. Then, the Structure from Motion (SFM) algorithm was used to extract the 3D point cloud from ordered images that could form a digital orthophoto model (DOM) and sparse point cloud. The results show that the vegetation index-based method could accurately estimate canopy coverage. Among EXG, EXR, RGBVI, GLI, and CIVE, EXG achieved the best adaptability in different test plots. Point cloud data could be used to estimate plant height, but when the potato coverage rate was low, potato canopy point cloud data underwent rarefaction; in the vigorous growth period, the estimated value was substantially connected with the measured value (R 2 = 0.94). The relationship between the coverage area of spraying on potato canopy and canopy coverage was measured indoors to form the model. The results revealed that the model could estimate the dose accurately (R 2 = 0.878). Therefore, combining agronomic factors with data extracted from the UAV RGB image had the ability to predict the field spraying volume.

Keywords: UAV; vegetation coverage; spraying volume; RGB images; potato (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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