Innovative yield mapping system using hyperspectral and thermal imaging for precision tree crop management

Original objectives and revisions – The original overall objective was to develop, test and validate a prototype yield mapping system for unit area to increase yield and profit for tree crops. Specific objectives were: (1) to develop a yield mapping system for a static situation, using hyperspectral and thermal imaging independently, (2) to integrate hyperspectral and thermal imaging for improved yield estimation by combining thermal images with hyperspectral images to improve fruit detection, and (3) to expand the system to a mobile platform for a stop-measure- and-go situation. There were no major revisions in the overall objective, however, several revisions were made on the specific objectives. The revised specific objectives were: (1) to develop a yield mapping system for a static situation, using color and thermal imaging independently, (2) to integrate color and thermal imaging for improved yield estimation by combining thermal images with color images to improve fruit detection, and (3) to expand the system to an autonomous mobile platform for a continuous-measure situation. Background, major conclusions, solutions and achievements -- Yield mapping is considered as an initial step for applying precision agriculture technologies. Although many yield mapping systems have been developed for agronomic crops, it remains a difficult task for mapping yield of tree crops. In this project, an autonomous immature fruit yield mapping system was developed. The system could detect and count the number of fruit at early growth stages of citrus fruit so that farmers could apply site-specific management based on the maps. There were two sub-systems, a navigation system and an imaging system. Robot Operating System (ROS) was the backbone for developing the navigation system using an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). An inertial measurement unit (IMU), wheel encoders and a GPS were integrated using an extended Kalman filter to provide reliable and accurate localization information. A LiDAR was added to support simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms. The color camera on a Microsoft Kinect was used to detect citrus trees and a new machine vision algorithm was developed to enable autonomous navigations in the citrus grove. A multimodal imaging system, which consisted of two color cameras and a thermal camera, was carried by the vehicle for video acquisitions. A novel image registration method was developed for combining color and thermal images and matching fruit in both images which achieved pixel-level accuracy. A new Color- Thermal Combined Probability (CTCP) algorithm was created to effectively fuse information from the color and thermal images to classify potential image regions into fruit and non-fruit classes. Algorithms were also developed to integrate image registration, information fusion and fruit classification and detection into a single step for real-time processing. The imaging system achieved a precision rate of 95.5% and a recall rate of 90.4% on immature green citrus fruit detection which was a great improvement compared to previous studies. Implications – The development of the immature green fruit yield mapping system will help farmers make early decisions for planning operations and marketing so high yield and profit can be achieved.