Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Thermal Imaging for Automating Water Status in Vineyard

Abstract

Thermal imaging is utilized as a technique in agricultural crop water management due to its efficiency in estimating canopy surface temperature and the ability to predict crop water levels. Thermal imaging was considered as a beneficial integration in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for agricultural and civil engineering purposes with the reduced weight of thermal imaging systems and increased resolution. When implemented on-site, this technique was able to address a number of difficulties, including estimation of water in the plant in farms or fields, while considering officially induced variability or naturally existing water level. The proposed effort aims to determine the amount of water content in a vineyard using the high-resolution thermal imaging. This research work has developed an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that is particularly intended to display high-resolution images. This approach will be able to generate crop water stress index (CWSI) by utilizing a thermal imaging system on a clear-sky day. The measured values were compared to the estimated stomatal conductance (sg) and stem water (s) potential along the Vineyard at the same time. To evaluate the performance of the proposed work, special modelling approach was used to identify the pattern of variation in water level. Based on the observation, it was concluded that both ‘sg’ and ‘s’ value have correlated well with the CWSI value by indicating a great potential to monitor instantaneous changes in water level. However, based on seasonal changes in water status, it was discovered that the recorded thermal images did not correspond to seasonal variations in water status.