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Smart agriculture is a new concept that combines agriculture and new technologies to improve the yield’s quality and quantity as well as facilitate many tasks for farmers in managing orchards. An essential factor in smart agriculture is tree crown segmentation, which helps farmers automatically monitor their orchards and get information about each tree. However, one of the main problems, in this case, is when the trees are close to each other, which means that it would be difficult for the algorithm to delineate the crowns correctly. This paper used satellite images and machine learning algorithms to segment and classify trees in overlapping orchards. The data used are images from the Moroccan Mohammed VI satellite, and the study region is the OUARGHA citrus orchard located in Morocco. Our approach starts by segmenting the rows inside the parcel and finding all the trees there, getting their canopies, and classifying them by size. In general, the model inputs the parcel’s image and other field measurements to classify the trees into three classes: missing/weak, normal, or big. Finally, the results are visualized in a map containing all the trees with their classes. For the results, we obtained a score of 0.93 F-measure in rows segmentation. Additionally, several field comparisons were performed to validate the classification, dozens of trees were compared and the results were very good. This paper aims to help farmers to quickly and automatically classify trees by crown size, even if there are overlapping orchards, in order to easily monitor each tree’s health and understand the tree’s distribution in the field.

No abstract

The overall goal of this study is to define an intelligent system for predicting citrus fruit yield before the harvest period. This system uses a machine learning algorithm trained on historical field data combined with spectral information extracted from satellite images. To this end, we used 5 years of historical data for a Moroccan orchard composed of 50 parcels. These data are related to climate, amount of water used for irrigation, fertilization products by dose, phytosanitary treatment dose, parcel size, and root-stock type on each parcel. Additionally, two very popular indices, the normalized difference vegetation index and normalized difference water index were extracted from Sentinel 2 and Landsat satellite images to improve prediction scores. We managed to build a total dataset composed of 250 rows, representing the 50 parcels over a period of 5 years labeled with the yield of each parcel. Several machine learning algorithms were tested with the necessary parameter optimization, while the orthonormal automatic pursuit algorithm gave good prediction scores of 0.2489 (MAE: Mean Absolute Error) and 0.0843 (MSE: Mean Squared Error). Finally, the approach followed in this study shows excellent potential for fruit yield prediction. In fact, the test was performed on a citrus orchard, but the same approach can be used on other tree crops to achieve the same goal.