Airborne remote sensing of vineyards for the detection of dead vine trees

Airborne remote sensing technology can be used to accurately monitor vineyards. In this paper we present a method to detect missing or dead trees. This is achieved by exploiting the periodic structure of a vineyard: equally spaced trees are planted in parallel rectilinear rows. This clearly appears on the spectrum which can be analyzed using the Radon transform. Simple morphological operators then enable the detection of unusal spaces within the plantation rows, corresponding to missing trees.