Abstract
Abstract. A widely used form of renewable energy are bioenergy crops. One form of it is the energy forestry that includes short rotation coppice plantations in which fast growing species of tree or woody shrub are grown (e.g. poplar, willow). The accurate prediction of forest biomass and volume can be used for the evaluation of plant breeding efficiency as well. The automatic tracking of plant development by traditional methods is quite difficult and labor intensive. Since energy forestries often contain different trees for estimating their volume it is essential to find segments containing the same tree species in the image.We investigated the applicability of a low cost UAV and an intermediate cost UAV in the field of agricultural image segmentation that is the first stage of biomass estimation (Gatziolis et al., 2015, Gaulton et al., 2015).This paper is a case study that shows the results of several segmentation algorithms applied on imagery obtained by a low cost UAV with low-cost camera, and imagery gathered by a UAV and camera set that are of higher quality and price. In the case study, we have observed two small forestry areas that contained six different tree species and their hybrids. Our results show that more expensive, better-equipped drone shots do not necessary provide significantly better segmentation.
Highlights
Plants can be divided into food, feed and industrial plants for cultivation purposes
To be able to evaluate the results of segmentations, we created the ground truth files manually, based on the data recorded on site and the guidelines of an expert
The aim of the paper was to investigate the applicability of a low-cost and an intermediate cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in the field of tree species segmentation
Summary
Plants can be divided into food, feed and industrial plants for cultivation purposes. Energy plants are important for preserving the Earth’s ecology and as alternative energy sources like biofuel. They play an important role both in producing bio-fuel and heating electricity-generating power stations. Until recently, measuring the volume, spatial arrangement and shape of trees with precision has been constrained by technological and logistical limitations and cost. Three dimensional (3D) data can be constructed, that can be used for energy plants monitoring and assessing tree attributes (Mohan et al, 2017, Watts, 2012). The creation of a 3D model from 2D images obtained by UAV is necessary for measuring the volume of plants and monitoring their vegetation
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