Sugarcane canopy detection using high spatial resolution UAS images and digital surface model

Abstract

The use of an unmanned aerial system (UAS) equipped with multispectral cameras is a potential approach to acquire canopy reflectance to make various correlations with desired crop parameters. However, the acquired reflectance data are mixed with unwanted data, such as reflectance from soil, which significantly affects some commonly used vegetation indices, such as the NDVI. This study compares the performance of three methods for detecting the canopy area of 3-month-old sugarcane crops. These methods extract the canopy areas using 5 NDVI thresholds (0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, and 0.6), a principal component analysis (PCA) threshold, and a digital surface model (DSM) threshold. The performance assessment will deliberately consider the quality percentage (QP) of each method to correctly detect the canopy area of short sugarcane crops in 10 selected images. The results show that filtration by the PCA threshold method provides the best result with a QP of 65.89-78.72%. The NDVI threshold method at levels of 0.3 and 0.4 follow with QPs of 58.42-68.81% and 40.80-70.81%, respectively, and the lowest accuracy is obtained by the DSM threshold method, which has QPs of 14.80-30.78%.