scholarly journals Detection of Fir Trees (Abies sibirica) Damaged by the Bark Beetle in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Images with Deep Learning

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 643 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasiia Safonova ◽  
Siham Tabik ◽  
Domingo Alcaraz-Segura ◽  
Alexey Rubtsov ◽  
Yuriy Maglinets ◽  
...  

Invasion of the Polygraphus proximus Blandford bark beetle causes catastrophic damage to forests with firs (Abies sibirica Ledeb) in Russia, especially in Central Siberia. Determining tree damage stage based on the shape, texture and colour of tree crown in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images could help to assess forest health in a faster and cheaper way. However, this task is challenging since (i) fir trees at different damage stages coexist and overlap in the canopy, (ii) the distribution of fir trees in nature is irregular and hence distinguishing between different crowns is hard, even for the human eye. Motivated by the latest advances in computer vision and machine learning, this work proposes a two-stage solution: In a first stage, we built a detection strategy that finds the regions of the input UAV image that are more likely to contain a crown, in the second stage, we developed a new convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that predicts the fir tree damage stage in each candidate region. Our experiments show that the proposed approach shows satisfactory results on UAV Red, Green, Blue (RGB) images of forest areas in the state nature reserve “Stolby” (Krasnoyarsk, Russia).

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
mingzheng zhang ◽  
Xinsheng Wang ◽  
Jinghao Xue ◽  
Wei Su ◽  
Dehai Zhu ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: Monitoring armyworm (Mythimna separata Walker) damage in crops requires timely, rapid and accurate observations to avoid severe yield losses. Results: The Random Forest (RF) classifier was more effective at automatically and accurately monitoring armyworm damage compared with Support Vector Machine (SVM), Multilayer Perceptron Classifier (MLPC) and Naive Bayes Classifier (NB) classifiers. Furthermore, the incorporation of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) image-generated digital surface model improved the performance of the RF classifier, increasing the F-score from 0.985 and 0.970 to 0.997 and 0.994, and increasing the Kappa coefficient from 0.955 to 0.990. In addition, we found that Band 3 (735 nm) of the UAV image and Band 6 (740 nm) of a coincident Sentinel-2 image were not sensitive to an armyworm infestation in this study. Conclusions: We developed an accurate algorithm for the automated identification of armyworm-damaged corn plants using UAV images at the field scale. The study also indicated the feasibility of the developed method for monitoring corn armyworm damage at regional scale when combined with Sentinel-2 images.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (13) ◽  
pp. 4442
Author(s):  
Zijie Niu ◽  
Juntao Deng ◽  
Xu Zhang ◽  
Jun Zhang ◽  
Shijia Pan ◽  
...  

It is important to obtain accurate information about kiwifruit vines to monitoring their physiological states and undertake precise orchard operations. However, because vines are small and cling to trellises, and have branches laying on the ground, numerous challenges exist in the acquisition of accurate data for kiwifruit vines. In this paper, a kiwifruit canopy distribution prediction model is proposed on the basis of low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images and deep learning techniques. First, the location of the kiwifruit plants and vine distribution are extracted from high-precision images collected by UAV. The canopy gradient distribution maps with different noise reduction and distribution effects are generated by modifying the threshold and sampling size using the resampling normalization method. The results showed that the accuracies of the vine segmentation using PSPnet, support vector machine, and random forest classification were 71.2%, 85.8%, and 75.26%, respectively. However, the segmentation image obtained using depth semantic segmentation had a higher signal-to-noise ratio and was closer to the real situation. The average intersection over union of the deep semantic segmentation was more than or equal to 80% in distribution maps, whereas, in traditional machine learning, the average intersection was between 20% and 60%. This indicates the proposed model can quickly extract the vine distribution and plant position, and is thus able to perform dynamic monitoring of orchards to provide real-time operation guidance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 173 ◽  
pp. 95-121
Author(s):  
Juepeng Zheng ◽  
Haohuan Fu ◽  
Weijia Li ◽  
Wenzhao Wu ◽  
Le Yu ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Veronika Kopačková-Strnadová ◽  
Lucie Koucká ◽  
Jan Jelenek ◽  
Zuzana Lhotakova ◽  
Filip Oulehle

Remote sensing is one of the modern methods that have significantly developed over the last two decades and nowadays provides a new means for forest monitoring. High spatial and temporal resolutions are demanded for accurate and timely monitoring of forests. In this study multi-spectral Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) images were used to estimate canopy parameters (definition of crown extent, top and height as well as photosynthetic pigment contents). The UAV images in Green, Red, Red-Edge and NIR bands were acquired by Parrot Sequoia camera over selected sites in two small catchments (Czech Republic) covered dominantly by Norway spruce monocultures. Individual tree extents, together with tree tops and heights, were derived from the Canopy Height Model (CHM). In addition, the following were tested i) to what extent can the linear relationship be established between selected vegetation indexes (NDVI and NDVIred edge) derived for individual trees and the corresponding ground truth (e.g., biochemically assessed needle photosynthetic pigment contents), and ii) whether needle age selection as a ground truth and crown light conditions affect the validity of linear models. The results of the conducted statistical analysis show that the two vegetation indexes (NDVI and NDVIred edge) tested here have a potential to assess photosynthetic pigments in Norway spruce forests at a semi-quantitative level, however the needle-age selection as a ground truth was revealed to be a very important factor. The only usable results were obtained for linear models when using the 2nd year needle pigment contents as a ground truth. On the other hand, the illumination conditions of the crown proved to have very little effect on the model’s validity. No study was found to directly compare these results conducted on coniferous forest stands. This shows that there is a further need for studies dealing with a quantitative estimation of the biochemical variables of nature coniferous forests when employing spectral data acquired by the UAV platform at a very high spatial resolution.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 1226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianqing Zhao ◽  
Xiaohu Zhang ◽  
Chenxi Gao ◽  
Xiaolei Qiu ◽  
Yongchao Tian ◽  
...  

To improve the efficiency and effectiveness of mosaicking unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images, we propose in this paper a rapid mosaicking method based on scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) for mosaicking UAV images used for crop growth monitoring. The proposed method dynamically sets the appropriate contrast threshold in the difference of Gaussian (DOG) scale-space according to the contrast characteristics of UAV images used for crop growth monitoring. Therefore, this method adjusts and optimizes the number of matched feature point pairs in UAV images and increases the mosaicking efficiency. Meanwhile, based on the relative location relationship of UAV images used for crop growth monitoring, the random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm is integrated to eliminate the influence of mismatched point pairs in UAV images on mosaicking and to keep the accuracy and quality of mosaicking. Mosaicking experiments were conducted by setting three types of UAV images in crop growth monitoring: visible, near-infrared, and thermal infrared. The results indicate that compared to the standard SIFT algorithm and frequently used commercial mosaicking software, the method proposed here significantly improves the applicability, efficiency, and accuracy of mosaicking UAV images in crop growth monitoring. In comparison with image mosaicking based on the standard SIFT algorithm, the time efficiency of the proposed method is higher by 30%, and its structural similarity index of mosaicking accuracy is about 0.9. Meanwhile, the approach successfully mosaics low-resolution UAV images used for crop growth monitoring and improves the applicability of the SIFT algorithm, providing a technical reference for UAV application used for crop growth and phenotypic monitoring.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (7) ◽  
pp. 2007
Author(s):  
Ruizhe Shao ◽  
Chun Du ◽  
Hao Chen ◽  
Jun Li

With the development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) techniques, UAV images are becoming more widely used. However, as an essential step of UAV image application, the computation of stitching remains time intensive, especially for emergency applications. Addressing this issue, we propose a novel approach to use the position and pose information of UAV images to speed up the process of image stitching, called FUIS (fast UAV image stitching). This stitches images by feature points. However, unlike traditional approaches, our approach rapidly finds several anchor-matches instead of a lot of feature matches to stitch the image. Firstly, from a large number of feature points, we design a method to select a small number of them that are more helpful for stitching as anchor points. Then, a method is proposed to more quickly and accurately match these anchor points, using position and pose information. Experiments show that our method significantly reduces the time consumption compared with the-state-of-art approaches with accuracy guaranteed.


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