Thermal Radiation Dynamics of Soil Surfaces with Unmanned Aerial Systems

Thermographies are a source of abundant and rapid information, valuable in precision agriculture tasks such as crop stress assessment, plant disease analysis, and soil moisture evaluation. Traditionally, practitioners obtain soil temperature directly from the ground or using satellites and other airborne methods, which are costly and have a low spatial and temporal resolution. In this paper, we introduce a method for short term tracking of thermal radiance inertia with the use of an unmanned aerial system (UAS). In our approach, we retro-project the spatial reconstruction obtained with structure from motion (SfM) to estimate the thermal radiation corresponding to three-dimensional structures. Then, we register the resulting orthomosaics using a pyramidal scheme. We use the first cloud of points as the fixed reference as new orthomosaics become available. Finally, we estimate the dynamics of the thermal radiation using the difference of the registered orthomosaic radiation intensity measurements.

[1]  Lorenzo Bruzzone,et al.  Robust Registration of Multimodal Remote Sensing Images Based on Structural Similarity , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[2]  Cristian Mattar,et al.  Soil emissivity and reflectance spectra measurements. , 2009, Applied optics.

[3]  Chunhua Zhang,et al.  The application of small unmanned aerial systems for precision agriculture: a review , 2012, Precision Agriculture.

[4]  Danilo Schneider,et al.  Analysis of Different Methods for 3D Reconstruction of Natural Surfaces from Parallel‐Axes UAV Images , 2015 .

[5]  Andrea Berton,et al.  Forestry applications of UAVs in Europe: a review , 2017 .

[6]  Hongguang Li,et al.  Image Registration and Fusion of Visible and Infrared Integrated Camera for Medium-Altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Remote Sensing , 2017, Remote. Sens..

[7]  Maxime Lhuillier.  Incremental Fusion of Structure-from-Motion and GPS Using Constrained Bundle Adjustments , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[8]  Chung-Hsien Tsai,et al.  An accelerated image matching technique for UAV orthoimage registration , 2017 .

[9]  W. Minkina,et al.  Atmospheric transmission coefficient modelling in the infrared for thermovision measurements , 2016 .

[10]  Kazunobu Ishii,et al.  Correction of Low-altitude Thermal Images applied to estimating Soil Water Status , 2007 .

[11]  J.-Y. Bouguet,et al.  Pyramidal implementation of the lucas kanade feature tracker , 1999 .

[12]  Robert Garfinkel,et al.  Mosaicking of Aerial Photographic Maps Via Seams Defined by Bottleneck Shortest Paths , 1998, Oper. Res..

[13]  John P. Fulton,et al.  An overview of current and potential applications of thermal remote sensing in precision agriculture , 2017, Comput. Electron. Agric..

[14]  Jan-Michael Frahm,et al.  Reconstructing the world* in six days , 2015, 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

[15]  Jan-Michael Frahm,et al.  Structure-from-Motion Revisited , 2016, 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

[16]  YangQuan Chen,et al.  Survey of thermal infrared remote sensing for Unmanned Aerial Systems , 2014, 2014 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS).

[17]  Per K. Enge,et al.  Global positioning system: signals, measurements, and performance [Book Review] , 2002, IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine.

[18]  N. M. Mattikalli,et al.  Microwave remote sensing of temporal variations of brightness temperature and near‐surface soil water content during a watershed‐scale field experiment, and its application to the estimation of soil physical properties , 1998 .

[19]  Austin M. Jensen,et al.  Assessment of Surface Soil Moisture Using High-Resolution Multi-Spectral Imagery and Artificial Neural Networks , 2015, Remote. Sens..

[20]  Michael Schwind.  Comparing and characterizing three-dimensional point clouds derived by structure from motion photogrammetry , 2016 .

[21]  Ronen Basri,et al.  A Survey on Structure from Motion , 2017, ArXiv.

[22]  D. Quattrochi,et al.  Thermal infrared remote sensing for analysis of landscape ecological processes: methods and applications , 1999, Landscape Ecology.

[23]  Ayse Irmak,et al.  Satellite‐based ET estimation in agriculture using SEBAL and METRIC , 2011 .

[24]  Karen Anderson,et al.  Lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles will revolutionize spatial ecology , 2013 .

[25]  Jan-Michael Frahm,et al.  Reconstructing the World* in Six Days *(As Captured by the Yahoo 100 Million Image Dataset) , 2015, CVPR 2015.