Vision-based monitoring of orchards with UAVs

Stefas, Nikolaos; Bayram, Haluk; Isler, Volkan

doi:10.1016/j.compag.2019.05.023

Cited by 36 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…VTOL UAVs are easy to maneuver and have the freedom from bad weather and even site condition restrictions. In addition to the UAVs mentioned above, customized UAVs have also emerged in order to meet particular requirements in some case studies (Stefas et al 2019). These UAVs are regarded as imaging and remote sensing platforms in orchard management.…”

Section: Uav Platformsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the literature reviewed, research using LiDAR only was described in one paper, which focused on the geometric traits measurement of apple trees (Hadas et al 2019). The application of LiDAR is limited by cost and power consumption, especially in the case of lightweight UAVs (Stefas et al 2019). Depending on the application scenario, the five main sensor types play different roles in different orchard management activities (Fig.…”

Section: Sensorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To deal with this, flowering density calculated from 3D point clouds was proved to monitor the flowering dynamics at field scale using sfm and OBIA approaches (Lopez-Granados et al 2019). To further improve the feasibility of UAV in yield mapping, a vision-based UAV system was suggested (Stefas et al 2019). Its capability of avoiding obstacle in high density orchards enable increasing spatial resolution navigating autonomously among apple rows and trees.…”

Section: Fruit-tree Productivity Traitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Orchard management with small unmanned aerial vehicles: a survey of sensing and analysis approaches

et al. 2021

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Advances in sensor miniaturization are increasing the global popularity of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based remote sensing applications in many domains of agriculture. Fruit orchards (the source of the fruit industry chain) require site-specific or even individual-tree-specific management throughout the growing season—from flowering, fruitlet development, ripening, and harvest—to tree dormancy. The recent increase in research on deploying UAV in orchard management has yielded new insights but challenges relating to determining the optimal approach (e.g., image-processing methods) are hampering widespread adoption, largely because there is no standard workflow for the application of UAVs in orchard management. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review focused on UAV-based orchard management: the survey includes achievements to date and shortcomings to be addressed. Sensing system architecture focusing on UAVs and sensors is summarized. Then up-to-date applications supported by UAVs in orchard management are described, focusing on the diversity of data-processing techniques, including monitoring efficiency and accuracy. With the goal of identifying the gaps and examining the opportunities for UAV-based orchard management, this study also discusses the performance of emerging technologies and compare similar research providing technical and comprehensive support for the further exploitation of UAVs and a revolution in orchard management.

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Section: Uav Platformsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sensorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Fruit-tree Productivity Traitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Orchard management with small unmanned aerial vehicles: a survey of sensing and analysis approaches

et al. 2021

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“…In the context of increasing demand for seasonal migrant farm labour in member European Union states and its supply side disruption due to the pandemic [1], autonomous crop monitoring has gained further importance for plant phenotyping, yield monitoring, crop protection, and harvesting. The availability of different sensors and systems has enabled crop monitoring at different levels from global low resolution satellite mapping [2] to drone-based crop-level mapping [3], [4] to individualized plant level mapping using mobile robots [5] and mobile manipulators [6], with an increase in the level of detail and precision. While global crop monitoring is necessary to make coarse yield predictions, fruit mapping is key to accurate yield monitoring and to performing automated precise interventions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fruit Mapping with Shape Completion for Autonomous Crop Monitoring

Marangoz¹,

Zaenker²,

Menon³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Autonomous crop monitoring is a difficult task due to the complex structure of plants. Occlusions from leaves can make it impossible to obtain complete views about all fruits of, e.g., pepper plants. Therefore, accurately estimating the shape and volume of fruits from partial information is crucial to enable further advanced automation tasks such as yield estimation and automated fruit picking. In this paper, we present an approach for mapping fruits on plants and estimating their shape by matching superellipsoids. Our system segments fruits in images and uses their masks to generate point clouds of the fruits. To combine sequences of acquired point clouds, we utilize a real-time 3D mapping framework and build up a fruit map based on truncated signed distance fields. We cluster fruits from this map and use optimized superellipsoids for matching to obtain accurate shape estimates.In our experiments, we show in various simulated scenarios with a robotic arm equipped with an RGB-D camera that our approach can accurately estimate fruit volumes. Additionally, we provide qualitative results of estimated fruit shapes from data recorded in a commercial glasshouse environment.

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“…UAVs are not only employed for inspection and remote sensing tasks, but also for other purposes. UAVs can be useful for antenna and coverage diagnostics in mobile networks [19], for natural objectives [20] or for precision agriculture [21] [22]. Also, UAVs can be a powerful tool in search and rescue missions [23].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%