An Open-Source UAV Image Processing Web Service for Crop Health Monitoring

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry has allowed to monitor crop growth/health and remotely estimate biomass through calculation of Vegetation Indices (VI). However, some of the indices require costly sensors, and the process of generating VI maps from UAV images also requires commercial off-the-shelf software packages. This study uses existing open-source tools and methods to develop an algorithm for a web-service that can create orthophotos, canopy height model and VI's for red-green-blue (RGB) images collected from UAV. We also discuss on ways to balance between the processing speed and quality of outputs, and further compare them to the outputs of an existing state-of-the-art commercial service.