Ground-based Remote Sensing Technology for Precision Farming - Calibration of Image-based Data to Reflectance -

Assessing health condition of crop in the field is one of core operation in precision fanning. A sensing system was proposed to remotely detect the crop health condition in terms of SP AD readings directly related to chlorophyll contents of crop using a multispectral camera equipped on ground-based platform. Since the image taken by a camera was sensitive to changes in ambient light intensity, it was needed to convert gray scale image data into reflectance, an index to indicate the reflection characteristics of target crop. A reference reflectance panel consisting of four pieces of sub-panels with different reflectance was developed for a dynamic calibration, by which a calibration equation was updated for every crop image captured by the camera. The system performance was evaluated in a field by investigating the relationship between com canopy reflectance and SP AD values. The validation tests revealed that the com canopy reflectance induced from Green band in the multispectral camera had the most significant correlation with SPAD values $(r^2=0.75)$ and NIR band could be used to filter out unwanted non-crop features such as soil background and empty space in a crop canopy. This research confirmed that it was technically feasible to develop a ground-based remote sensing system for assessing crop health condition.