Early estimation of canopy nitrogen (N) levels in cotton is necessary to maintain optimal canopy growth and derive best yields. Combining remote sensing and computer vision algorithms has made it possible to extract high-resolution spectral reflectance and canopy level morphology from larger fields. An experiment was conducted to study the response of cotton to four N application rates (0 kg/ha, 56 kg/ha, 112 kg/ha, 168 kg/ha). The differences in canopy N uptake and canopy height in response to the treatments became significant (p-value < 0.05) at the squaring stage. The objective of this study was to detect N stress levels in cotton canopy as early as the squaring stage and also estimate canopy N uptake (kg N/plant) from UAV-based multispectral images. Spectral vegetation indices and morphological features (canopy height and fractional canopy cover) were estimated from calibrated orthomosaics and digital elevation models (DEM). N uptake was estimated by single-parameter regression and multi-parameter regression (LASSO and Random Forest). Unsupervised k-Means clustering was used to separate the plots into three stress levels (stressed, moderately stressed, healthy) in a high dimension space. Canopy height was estimated with an overall R2 = 0.911 and MAPE = 22.244, however the estimation errors were high before the squaring stage. Rededge (RE) band-based indices (NDRE and CIrededge) were more sensitive to canopy N status than others. The best estimates of cotton plant N uptake from single parameter regression were obtained for measure canopy height (MAPE = 30.902) and NDRE (MAPE = 47.501). The multi-parameter models further improved N uptake estimation accuracy (LASSO MAPE = 22.133; random forest MAPE = 23.804). The results from k-means clustering showed that weekly changes (Δweekly) in features had better class separation and accuracy scores than instantaneous values of features observed at squaring. Clustering based on NDRE for canopy pixels and actual height gave the optimum separation (silhouette score = 0.488) and classification accuracy (adjusted rand index = 0.417).
Cotton root rot (CRR) is a serious cotton disease primarily found in southwestern U.S., causing an average annual loss of about 29 million USD in Texas alone. Therefore, management of CRR infected cotton fields is crucial to the U.S. and Texas cotton industry. CRR usually appears at similar regions of the cotton fields each year, so detecting the locations of infected regions can make the management practices efficient for multiple growing seasons. Previous methods of mapping the regions of CRR involved classical image processing techniques like unsupervised machine learning methods, which are not viable for real-time detection. In this preliminary study, we present a deep-learning (DL) based method using YOLOv5 to detect the CRR infected regions of a cotton field, and then we demonstrate its ability for real-time detection by deploying it on an edge-computing platform (Pascal GPU of NVIDIA Jetson TX2 development board). In the end, we also show how the locations of detected CRR regions can be used to generate an optimal path for efficient management practices with the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. Our preliminary results showed a moderate level of detection accuracy at a promising average inference speed of 11 frames per second (FPS). The total distance covered based on the optimal path of four detected regions of CRR was 160 m. Hence, through this study we were able to demonstrate that a DL based approach with the ACO algorithm has the potential to speed up management practices of CRR infected cotton fields with multispectral aerial imagery.
Volunteer cotton (VC) plants growing in fields of inter-seasonal crop like corn can act as host for the boll weevil pests; therefore, they need to be detected, located, and sprayed to prevent reinfestation of the pest in the following season. However, detecting the VC plants in corn fields has always been challenging as they remain hidden under the canopy and appear spectrally similar during the early growth phase. In this paper, we show that deep learning based YOLOv3 model can be used to detect VC plants in early growth corn field on RGB aerial images collected remotely by unmanned aircraft system (UAS) at a mean average precision (mAP) of 90.60% and F1-score of 86.35%. The approach of using deep learning to detect VC plants demonstrates its ability to be used for near real-time detection thereby expediting the management aspects of Texas Boll Weevil Eradication Program.
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