Monitoring Rice Crop and Paddy Field Condition Using UAV RGB Imagery

Abstract

An effective crop management practice is very important to the sustenance of crop production. With the emergence of Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR 4.0), precision farming has become the key element in modern agriculture to help farmers in maintaining the sustainability of crop production. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) also known as drone was widely used in agriculture as one of the potential technologies to collect the data and monitor the crop condition. Managing and monitoring the paddy field especially at the bigger scale is one of the biggest challenges for farmers. Traditionally, the paddy field and crop condition are only monitored and observed manually by the farmers which may sometimes lead to inaccurate observation of the plot due the large area. Therefore, this study proposes the application of unmanned aerial vehicles and RGB imagery for monitoring rice crop development and paddy field condition. The integration of UAV with RGB digital camera were used to collect the data in the paddy field. Result shows that the early monitoring of rice crops is important to identify the crop condition. Therefore, with the use of aerial imagery analysis from UAV, it can help to improve rice crop management and eventually is expected to increase rice crop production.