Objective:To develop Drone for crop health monitoring that will help the farmers for observing and analysing the aerial views of the crop. This will give information related to the crop health, water system, pests soil variety, analysis of soil and drainage system.
Introduction:The world population is increasing very rapidly, which makes food security a challenging task. As per Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nation, more than 815 million people are chronically hungry out of which 64% of the chronically hungry are in Asia alone. By the year 2050 the World needs to increase food production by approximately 50% to feed a population of nine billion. As the population increasing, the basic resources for agriculture production such as land, water and other resources are becoming scarcer every day.
Recently the production of crop and food supply networks were highly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The basic requirements like labour, seeds, fertilisers, and pesticides were not available timely in the field of agriculture. Which results in less production.
As Asian countries are very high populace, and the issue is their agrarian efficiency is very low compared to technologically advanced nations. India is also having the similar issue. India is confronting with the issue of low level agriculture technology, lesser power availability and unskilled farmers, etc. More than 70% of the Indian population is dependent on the agriculture sector directly or indirectly. Cropping in India is still being done in a conventional manner. Farmers are traditional methods for farming, seed planting, compost and pesticides etc.
The conventional method used for fertiliser and pesticides spraying requires more time and are less effective. So there is a need for technology advancement. After COVID-19 pandemic monitoring of crop, fertilisers and pesticides spraying become very difficult for traditional farmers.
So, Drones could be the suitable solution to overcome these problems. The farmers and rural specialist may improve their activities to increase the yields by utilising the information collected by drones.
Aerial remote sensing technology is considered to be best technology for precision agriculture and smart farming. With the help of drones, Aerial remote sensing uses images of different wavelengths and calculates the vegetation indices to recognize the several conditions of crops. People used manned aircraft or satellites for precision agriculture. But capturing images using manned aircraft is very costly. Satellite image resolution is not very good. So using drones for remote sensing of crop solves these problems and its better options. This technology is less expensive, saves time, and make available high-resolution images.
Concept:The drone will capture the crop images by hovering above the crop.
The crop images captured by the drones will have the information in the range of visual and infrared spectral. We are gathering the information about the health of crop by extracting the different features from images, which cannot be seen with our naked eye. Using computer vision and AI algorithm for data analysis, the decision making of AI will be based on the previous training. The data (sensor data and images/video) of crop in agricultural fields collected using drones will be fed to the analytical models for analysis,
The developed analytical model will analyze the crop health and calculate the vegetation index. The feature ( Spectral features, Structural Features, Texture Features) extraction is the essential step while building the crop model using data driven models such as machine learning and deep learning. So, we will extract the various crop features (Spectral features, Structural Features, Texture Features).
After pre-processing and feature extraction steps are completed, the crop model to address specific applications will be developed.
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