The estimation of crop emergence in potatoes by UAV RGB imagery

Bo Li, Xiangming Xu, Jiwan Han, Li Zhang, Chunsong Bian, Liping Jin, Jiangang Liu

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

98 Citations (Scopus)
266 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Background: Crop emergence and canopy cover are important physiological traits for potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) cultivar evaluation and nutrients management. They play important roles in variety screening, field management and yield prediction. Traditional manual assessment of these traits is not only laborious but often subjective. Results: In this study, semi-automated image analysis software was developed to estimate crop emergence from high-resolution RGB ortho-images captured from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Potato plant objects were extracted from bare soil using Excess Green Index and Otsu thresholding methods. Six morphological features were calculated from the images to be variables of a Random Forest classifier for estimating the number of potato plants at emergence stage. The outputs were then used to estimate crop emergence in three field experiments that were designed to investigate the effects of cultivars, levels of potassium (K) fertiliser input, and new compound fertilisers on potato growth. The results indicated that RGB UAV image analysis can accurately estimate potato crop emergence rate in comparison to manual assessment, with correlation coefficient (r -2 r 2) of 0.96 and provide an efficient tool to evaluate emergence uniformity. Conclusions: The proposed UAV image analysis method is a promising tool for use as a high throughput phenotyping method for assessing potato crop development at emergence stage. It can also facilitate future studies on optimizing fertiliser management and improving emergence consistency.

Original languageEnglish
Article number15
JournalPlant Methods
Volume15
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 12 Feb 2019

Keywords

  • unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
  • potato
  • image analysis
  • remote sensing
  • crop emergence
  • random forest
  • Potato
  • Image analysis
  • Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
  • Crop emergence
  • Remote sensing
  • Random Forest

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The estimation of crop emergence in potatoes by UAV RGB imagery'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this