Automation solutions for the evaluation of plant health in corn fields

The continuously growing need for increasing the production of food and reducing the degradation of water supplies, has led to the development of several precision agriculture systems over the past decade so as to meet the needs of modern societies. The present study describes a methodology for the detection and characterization of Nitrogen (N) deficiencies in corn fields. Current methods of field surveillance are either completed manually or with the assistance of satellite imaging, which offer infrequent and costly information to the farmers about the state of their fields. The proposed methodology promotes the use of small-scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Computer Vision algorithms that operate with information in the visual (RGB) spectrum. Through this implementation, a lower cost solution for identifying N deficiencies is promoted. We provide extensive results on the use of commercial RGB sensors for delivering the essential information to farmers regarding the condition of their field, targeting the reduction of N fertilizers and the increase of the crop performance. Data is first collected by a UAV that hovers over a stressed area and collects high resolution RGB images at a low altitude. A recommendation algorithm identifies potential segments of the images that are candidates exhibiting N deficiency. Based on the feedback from experts in the area a training set is constructed utilizing the initial suggestions of the recommendation algorithm. Supervised learning methods are then used to characterize crop leaves that exhibit signs of N deficiency. The performance of 84.2% strongly supports the potential of this scheme to identify N-deficient leaves even in the case of images where the unhealthy leaves are heavily occluded by other healthy or stressed leaves.