Crop Height and Plot Estimation for Phenotyping from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles using 3D LiDAR

30 Oct 2019  ·  Harnaik Dhami, Kevin Yu, Tianshu Xu, Qian Zhu, Kshitiz Dhakal, James Friel, Song Li, Pratap Tokekar ·

We present techniques to measure crop heights using a 3D Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensor mounted on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Knowing the height of plants is crucial to monitor their overall health and growth cycles, especially for high-throughput plant phenotyping. We present a methodology for extracting plant heights from 3D LiDAR point clouds, specifically focusing on plot-based phenotyping environments. We also present a toolchain that can be used to create phenotyping farms for use in Gazebo simulations. The tool creates a randomized farm with realistic 3D plant and terrain models. We conducted a series of simulations and hardware experiments in controlled and natural settings. Our algorithm was able to estimate the plant heights in a field with 112 plots with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 6.1 cm. This is the first such dataset for 3D LiDAR from an airborne robot over a wheat field. The developed simulation toolchain, algorithmic implementation, and datasets can be found on the GitHub repository located at https://github.com/hsd1121/PointCloudProcessing.

PDF Abstract

Datasets


  Add Datasets introduced or used in this paper

Results from the Paper


  Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

Methods


No methods listed for this paper. Add relevant methods here