The optimisation of vineyards management requires efficient and automated methods able to identify individual plants. In the last few years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become one of the main sources of remote sensing information for Precision Viticulture (PV) applications. In fact, high resolution UAV-based imagery offers a unique capability for modelling plant’s structure making possible the recognition of significant geometrical features in photogrammetric point clouds. Despite the proliferation of innovative technologies in viticulture, the identification of individual grapevines relies on image-based segmentation techniques. In that way, grapevine and non-grapevine features are separated and individual plants are estimated usually considering a fixed distance between them. In this study, an automatic method for grapevine trunk detection, using 3D point cloud data, is presented. The proposed method focuses on the recognition of key geometrical parameters to ensure the existence of every plant in the 3D model. The method was tested in different commercial vineyards and to push it to its limit a vineyard characterised by several missing plants along the vine rows, irregular distances between plants and occluded trunks by dense vegetation in some areas, was also used. The proposed method represents a disruption in relation to the state of the art, and is able to identify individual trunks, posts and missing plants based on the interpretation and analysis of a 3D point cloud. Moreover, a validation process was carried out allowing concluding that the method has a high performance, especially when it is applied to 3D point clouds generated in phases in which the leaves are not yet very dense (January to May). However, if correct flight parametrizations are set, the method remains effective throughout the entire vegetative cycle.

3D plant structure observation and characterization to get a comprehensive knowledge about the plant status still poses a challenge in Precision Agriculture (PA). The complex branching and self-hidden geometry in the plant canopy are some of the existing problems for the 3D reconstruction of vegetation. In this paper, we propose a novel application for the fusion of multispectral images and high-resolution point clouds of an olive orchard. Our methodology is based on a multi-temporal approach to study the evolution of olive trees. This process is fully automated and no human intervention is required to characterize the point cloud with the reflectance captured by multiple multispectral images. The main objective of this work is twofold: (1) the multispectral image mapping on a high-resolution point cloud and (2) the multi-temporal analysis of morphological and spectral traits in two flight campaigns. Initially, the study area is modeled by taking multiple overlapping RGB images with a high-resolution camera from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In addition, a UAV-based multispectral sensor is used to capture the reflectance for some narrow-bands (green, near-infrared, red, and red-edge). Then, the RGB point cloud with a high detailed geometry of olive trees is enriched by mapping the reflectance maps, which are generated for every multispectral image. Therefore, each 3D point is related to its corresponding pixel of the multispectral image, in which it is visible. As a result, the 3D models of olive trees are characterized by the observed reflectance in the plant canopy. These reflectance values are also combined to calculate several vegetation indices (NDVI, RVI, GRVI, and NDRE). According to the spectral and spatial relationships in the olive plantation, segmentation of individual olive trees is performed. On the one hand, plant morphology is studied by a voxel-based decomposition of its 3D structure to estimate the height and volume. On the other hand, the plant health is studied by the detection of meaningful spectral traits of olive trees. Moreover, the proposed methodology also allows the processing of multi-temporal data to study the variability of the studied features. Consequently, some relevant changes are detected and the development of each olive tree is analyzed by a visual-based and statistical approach. The interactive visualization and analysis of the enriched 3D plant structure with different spectral layers is an innovative method to inspect the plant health and ensure adequate plantation sustainability.

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