Reducing the use of pesticides by early visual detection of diseases in precision agriculture is important. Because of the color similarity between potato-plant diseases, narrow band hyper-spectral imaging is required. Payload constraints on unmanned aerial vehicles require reduc- tion of spectral bands. Therefore, we present a methodology for per-patch classification combined with hyper-spectral band selection. In controlled experiments performed on a set of individual leaves, we measure the performance of five classifiers and three dimensionality-reduction methods with three patch sizes. With the best-performing classifier an error rate of 1.5% is achieved for distinguishing two important potato-plant diseases.
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Spectral imaging has many applications, from methane detection using satellites to disease detection on crops. However, spectral cameras remain a costly solution ranging from 10 thousand to 100 thousand euros for the hardware alone. Here, we present a low-cost multispectral camera (LC-MSC) with 64 LEDs in eight different colors and a monochrome camera with a hardware cost of 340 euros. Our prototype reproduces spectra accurately when compared to a reference spectrometer to within the spectral width of the LEDs used and the ±1σ variation over the surface of ceramic reference tiles. The mean absolute difference in reflectance is an overestimate of 0.03 for the LC-MSC as compared to a spectrometer, due to the spectral shape of the tiles. In environmental light levels of 0.5 W m−2 (bright artificial indoor lighting) our approach shows an increase in noise, but still faithfully reproduces discrete reflectance spectra over 400 nm–1000 nm. Our approach is limited in its application by LED bandwidth and availability of specific LED wavelengths. However, unlike with conventional spectral cameras, the pixel pitch of the camera itself is not limited, providing higher image resolution than typical high-end multi- and hyperspectral cameras. For sample conditions where LED illumination bands provide suitable spectral information, our LC-MSC is an interesting low-cost alternative approach to spectral imaging.
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Brochure from the Inauguration of Klaas Dijkstra, professor Computer Vision and Data Science
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In November 2019, the High Performance Greenhouse project (HiPerGreen) was nominated for the RAAK Award 2019, as one of the best applied research projects in the Netherlands. This paper discusses the challenges faced, lessons learned and critical factors in making the project into a success.
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