Digital image processing is one of the potential technologies used in precision agriculture to gather information, such as seed emergence, plant health, and phenology from the digital images. Despite its potential, the rate of adoption is slow due to limited accessibility, unsuitability to specific issues, unaffordability, and high technical knowledge requirement from the clientele. Therefore, the development of open source image processing applications that are task-specific, easy-to-use, requiring fewer inputs, and rich with features will be beneficial to the users/farmers for adoption. The Fiji software, an open source free image processing ImageJ platform, was used in this application development study. A collection of four different agricultural field applications were selected to address the existing issues and develop image processing tools by applying novel approaches and simple mathematical principles. First, an automated application, using a digital image and “pixel-march” method, performed multiple radial measurements of sunflower floral components. At least 32 measurements for ray florets and eight for the disc were required statistically for accurate dimensions. Second, the color calibration of digital images addressed the light intensity variations of images using standard calibration chart and derived color calibration matrix from selected color patches. Calibration using just three-color patches: red, green, and blue was sufficient to obtain images of uniform intensity. Third, plant stand count and their spatial distribution from UAS images were determined with an accuracy of ≈96 %, through pixel-profile identification method and plant cluster segmentation. Fourth, the soybean phenological stages from the PhenoCam time-lapse imagery were analyzed and they matched with the manual visual observation. The green leaf index produced the minimum variations from its smoothed curve. The time of image capture and PhenoCam distances had significant effects on the vegetation indices analyzed. A simplified approach using kymograph was developed, which was quick and efficient for phenological observations. Based on the study, these tools can be equally applied to other scenarios, or new user-coded, user-friendly, image processing tools can be developed to address specific requirements. In conclusion, these successful results demonstrated the suitability and possibility of task-specific, open source, digital image processing tools development for agricultural field applications. / United States. Agricultural Research Service / National Institute of Food and Agriculture (U.S.)

Agriculture faces many challenges related to the increasing food demands of a growing global population and the sustainable use of resources in a changing environment. To address them, we need reliable information sources, like exploiting hyperspectral satellite, airborne, and ground-based remote sensing data to observe phenological traits through a crops growth cycle and gather information to precisely diagnose when, why, and where a crop is suffering negative impacts. By combining hyperspectral capabilities with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), there is an increased capacity for providing time-critical monitoring and new insights into patterns of crop development. However, considerable effort is required to effectively utilize UAV-integrated hyperspectral systems in crop-modeling and crop-breeding tasks. Here, a UAV-based hyperspectral solution for mapping crop physiological parameters was explored within a machine learning framework. To do this, a range of complementary measurements were collected from a field-based phenotyping experiment, based on a diversity panel of wild tomato (Solanum pimpinellifolium) that were grown under fresh and saline conditions. From the UAV data, positionally accurate reflectance retrievals were produced using a computationally robust automated georectification and mosaicking methodology. The resulting multitemporal UAV data were then employed to retrieve leaf-chlorophyll (Chl) dynamics via a machine learning framework. Several approaches were evaluated to identify the best-performing regression supervised methods. An investigation of two learning strategies (i.e., sequential and retraining) and the value of using spectral bands and vegetation indices (VIs) as prediction features was also performed. Finally, the utility of UAVbased hyperspectral phenotyping was demonstrated by detecting the effects of salt-stress on the different tomato accessions by estimating the salt-induced senescence index from the retrieved Chl dynamics, facilitating the identification of salt-tolerant candidates for future investigations. This research illustrates the potential of UAV-based hyperspectral imaging for plant phenotyping and precision agriculture. In particular, a) developing systematic imaging calibration and pre-processing workflows; b) exploring machine learning-driven tools for retrieving plant phenological dynamics; c) establishing a plant stress detection approach from hyperspectral-derived metrics; and d) providing new insights into using computer vision, big-data analytics, and modeling strategies to deal effectively with the complexity of the UAV-based hyperspectral data in mapping plant physiological indicators.

No description available.

The collective body of U.S. legislation, colloquially known as the Farm Bill, authorizes a suite of practices and programs under its Conservation Title. This includes the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which incentivizes agricultural producers to remove arable land from production to enhance soil retention, improve water quality, and restore wildlife habitat. Conservation Practice 33: Habitat Buffers for Upland Birds (CP-33) was the first CRP practice to target wildlife habitat restoration. CP-33 incentivizes producers to reestablish native herbaceous vegetation along crop field margins. Producers are often concerned with the economic opportunity costs of CP-33 enrollment. I used yield data derived from 44 agricultural fields in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, USA to compare the environmental and economic opportunities associated with CP-33 establishment. I used yield data to develop a revenue distribution function to illustrate CP-33 revenue as commodity prices fluctuate. I found that as commodity prices increase, CP-33 implementation becomes less profitable.

Intense agriculture is detrimental to the environment and leads to nutrient runoff, decreased water quality, soil erosion, greenhouse gas emissions, and decreased wildlife habitat. In addition to negative environmental impacts, intense agriculture increases the financial strain on farmers. Farmers also face inconsistent yields from environmentally vulnerable lands. Due to these financial constraints and inconsistent yields, conservation goals are not always economically attractive to farmers and agricultural producers. One possible solution to this issue is the use of precision agriculture (PA) to inform strategic conservation efforts. We used PA technology to identify low-revenue field areas in the Mississippi Delta and Black Prairie regions. We created spatially explicit revenue maps and overlaid it with the Biologist Ranking Index (BRI) to illustrate where economic and conservation opportunities overlap. Our results indicate that, on average, upwards of 20.1% of the Black Prairie and 18.0% of the Mississippi Delta generate less revenue than conservation enrollment.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Detecting crop rows from video frames in real time is a fundamental challenge in the field of precision agriculture. Deep learning based semantic segmentation method, namely U-net, although successful in many tasks related to precision agriculture, performs poorly for solving this task. The reasons include paucity of large scale labeled datasets in this domain, diversity in crops, and the diversity of appearance of the same crops at various stages of their growth. In this work, we discuss the development of a practical real-life crop row detection system in collaboration with an agricultural sprayer company. Our proposed method takes the output of semantic segmentation using U-net, and then apply a clustering based probabilistic temporal calibration which can adapt to different fields and crops without the need for retraining the network. Experimental results validate that our method can be used for both refining the results of the U-net to reduce errors and also for frame interpolation of the input video stream. Upon the availability of more labeled data, we switched our approach from a semi-supervised model to a fully supervised end-to-end crop row detection model using a Feature Pyramid Network or FPN. Central to the FPN is a pyramid pooling module that extracts features from the input image at multiple resolutions. This results in the network’s ability to use both local and global features in classifying pixels to be crop rows. After training the FPN on the labeled dataset, our method obtained a mean IoU or Jaccard Index score of over 70% as reported on the test set. We trained our method on only a subset of the corn dataset and tested its performance on multiple variations of weed pressure and crop growth stages to verify that the performance does translate over the variations and is consistent across the entire dataset.

Internet of Things (IoT) has drawn much attention in recent years. With IoT, physical world entities get connected through internet. IoT is used currently in various applications, such as environmental monitoring, control systems, farming, home automation, security and surveillance systems etc. The aim of this research is to design a low-cost, energy-efficient, reliable and scalable embedded application for the smart greenhouse monitoring system. The IoT based system designed in this thesis uses various sensors to measure the air and soil quality parameters in the greenhouse, and monitor real-time data online using web-server and mobile phone based applications. A ZigBee based wireless sensor network is implemented to transport various sensory data to the gateway. Among other contributions, the designed system develops a new routing algorithm by introducing a confirmed delivery of packets and re-routing features. We also introduced an efficient cost metric for making routing decisions within WSN using hops count, and simple bi-directional link quality estimator using PRR and current battery voltage of neighbor nodes. We also verified the stability of the system by conducting various performance tests. The system is equipped with data analytic functions for the online examination of the data. The designed system adopts event-based triggering and data aggregation methods to reduce the number of transmissions, and develops a new algorithm for such purpose. The web-server and mobile applications have user interface to display the output of the data analytic services, warning, control operations and give access to query data of the user's interest.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an umbrella term for smart things connected to the Internet.Precision agriculture is a related concept where connected sensors can be used to facilitate, e.g. more effective farming. At the same time, Bluetooth has been making advancements into IoT with the release of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or Bluetooth smart as it is also known by. This thesis describes the development of a Bluetooth Low Energy moisture- and temperature sensor intended for use in an agricultural wireless sensor network system. The sensor was evaluated based on its effectiveness in agricultural environments and conditions such as weather, elevation and in different crop fields. Bluetooth Low Energy was chosen as the technology for communication by the supervising company due to its inherent support for mobile phone accessibility.Field tests showed that the sensor nodes were largely affected by greenery positioned betweentransmitter and receiver, meaning that these would preferably be placed above growing crops foreffective communication. With ideal placement of the sensor and receiving unit, the signal wouldreach up to 100 m, meaning that a receiving unit would cover a circle area with radius 100 m.Due to Bluetooth being largely integrated in mobile devices it would mean that sensor data couldeasily be made accessible with a mobile app, rather than acquiring data from an online web server.

Obtaining accurate and precise position information is critical in precision and autonomous agriculture. Systems accurate to the centimeter-level are available, but may be prohibitively expensive for relatively small farms and tasks that involve multiple vehicles. Optical resection is proposed as a potentially more cost-effective and scalable positioning system for such cases. The proposed system involves the placement of optical beacons at known locations throughout the environment and the use of cameras on the vehicle to detect the apparent angles between beacons. The position of the vehicle can be calculated with resection when three or four beacons are identified. In addition, the system provides precise orientation information, so a separate inertial measurement unit is not required. The system is seen as potentially cost-effective by taking advantage of the precision and low cost of digital image sensors. Whereas the components in other positioning systems tend to be more specialized, the widespread consumer demand for inexpensive and high quality cameras has allowed for billions of dollars of research and development to be spread across billions of image sensors. / Master of Science

Interpretar a enorme quantidade de dados coletados, entender as causas e propor estratégias para gerenciar a variabilidade do campo, freqüentemente são apontados como alguns dos principais problemas para o avanço da agricultura de precisão, AP. Os sistemas de informação tornam-se fundamentais na solução desses problemas, mas apesar de existirem muitos pacotes de software disponíveis no mercado, variando de muito simples a muito sofisticados e diversos sistemas originados de experiências de pesquisas, a natureza proprietária e monolítica das soluções impedem o uso em larga escala. A AP envolve uma grande variedade de técnicas de análise, fontes e formatos de dados, perfis de usuário, e muitos outros aspectos que tornam uma aplicação muito complexa do ponto de vista da engenharia de software. Com o objetivo de fornecer a base para o desenvolvimento de sistemas de informação para AP baseados em padrões abertos e plataformas de software livre, uma infra-estrutura de desenvolvimento de sistemas de informação para a agricultura de precisão é proposta. Com base nas idéias seminais dessa proposta, são desenvolvidos protótipos para a condução de experimentos, os quais exploram caminhos de evolução para a infra-estrutura, com especial atenção sobre aspectos de arquitetura de software. Como estudo de caso, uma aplicação web que realiza filtragem de dados de monitores de produtividade é apresentada. Usando a metodologia de desenvolvimento em espiral, sucessivas versões dessa aplicação foram criadas e os resultados usados para propor melhoramentos à infra-estrutura. A infra-estrutura final contém cinco componentes: uma arquitetura de referência para sistemas de informação orientados a serviços para AP, uma linguagem padrão para troca de dados entre serviços agrícolas, um barramento para conexão de serviços agrícolas, um provedor de serviços geoespaciais e um portal para serviços agrícolas. Ela se mostrou adequada para a criação de sistemas de informação para AP interoperáveis, de baixo custo e com capacidade de evolução, mudando o paradigma dos sistemas para AP preponderantemente proprietários e monolíticos para abertos e orientados a serviços distribuídos. / Interpreting the huge amount of data collected, understanding the causes and being able to propose sound strategies for the field variability management are frequently pointed out as major issues for the advance of precision agriculture. Therefore, the information systems become fundamental for the solution of these problems. Although there are many available software packages in the market, varying from simple to very sophisticated and diverse systems deriving from experiences of research, the monolithic and proprietary nature of the solutions hinder their use in wide scale. Precision agriculture involves a great variety of techniques of data analysis, data sources, data formats, user profiles, and many other aspects that make it a complex application from the software engineering point of view. Aiming to supply the base for the development of open standards-based precision agriculture information systems and free software platforms, an infrastructure for developing precision agriculture information systems is proposed. Based on the fundamentals of that proposal, prototypes are developed which explore different evolutionary paths for the infrastructure, with special attention to software architecture aspects. As a case study, a yield monitor data filtering web application is presented. Using the spiral development methodology, successive versions of this application were created and the results used to improve the infrastructure. The final infrastructure contains five components: a service-oriented reference architecture for precision agriculture information systems, a standard language for data exchange between agricultural services, a service bus for connecting agricultural services, a geospatial services provider, and an agricultural services portal. It revealed to be adequate for the creation of precision agriculture interoperable systems, of low cost and with capacity for evolution, moving the paradigm of systems for AP preponderantly monolithic and proprietary to open and distributed service-oriented.