Patent ID: 9719973
Date: 2017-08-01
CPC Classifications: A01B,A01C,G01N,G06Q

Claim:
1. A method for assessing the effectiveness of an agricultural application, the method comprising: capturing, by a data capture device associated with a ground vehicle, sensor data that comprises image data of a crop at a particular location or a particular zone within a field; determining, by a location-determining device, the particular location or a location identifier; receiving, at a processing unit, the sensor data and crop application parameters for the crop at the particular location or the particular zone within the field, wherein present crop data comprises the received sensor data and crop application parameters; storing, by the processing unit, prior crop data in a data storage device, prior crop data comprising a subset of the sensor data and the crop application parameters; searching, by the processing unit, the data storage device to locate the stored prior crop data corresponding to the present crop data and corresponding to an agricultural application for the crop at the particular location or the particular zone; retrieving, by the processing unit, the prior crop data from the data storage device; and facilitating, by the processing unit, an analysis to determine the effectiveness of the agricultural application with respect to plant growth, plant health or killing weeds within the crop, wherein the analysis includes a comparison by pixel color of green and brown pixels of the image data of the present crop data to the prior crop data to determine variation between present and prior images within a given area of the images, wherein the comparison comprises counting pixels within the given area of the collected image data and distinguishing the pixels according to pixel color by color differentiation, the pixels from the particular location or the particular zone of the present crop data compared against the same particular location or the same particular zone of the prior crop data, and wherein the image data of present crop data and prior crop data are captured from the same locations and same angles during passes of the vehicle to collect the image data.