Detection of Rows in Agricultural Crop Images Acquired by Remote Sensing from a UAV

Abstract

Detection of rows in crops planted as rows is fundamental to site specific management of agricultural farms. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are increasingly being used for agriculture applications. Images acquired using Low altitude remote sensing is analysed. In this paper we propose the detection of rows in an open field tomato crop by analyzing images acquired using remote sensing from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle used is a quadcopter fitted with an optical sensor. The optical sensor used is a vision spectrum camera. Spectral-spatial methods are applied in processing the images. K-Means clustering is used for spectral clustering. Clustering result is further improved by using spatial methods. Mathematical morphology and geometric shape operations of Shape Index and Density Index are used for spatial segmentation. Six images acquired at different altitudes are analysed to validate the robustness of the proposed method. Performance of row detection is analysed using confusion matrix. The results are comparable for the diverse image sets analyzed.