Acquisition of NIR-Green-Blue Digital Photographs from Unmanned Aircraft for Crop Monitoring

Payload size and weight are critical factors for small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Digital color-infrared photographs were acquired from a single 12-megapixel camera that did not have an internal hot-mirror filter and had a red-light-blocking filter in front of the lens, resulting in near-infrared (NIR), green and blue images. We tested the UAV-camera system over two variably-fertilized fields of winter wheat and found a good correlation between leaf area index and the green normalized difference vegetation index (GNDVI). The low cost and very-high spatial resolution associated with the camera-UAV system may provide important information for site-specific agriculture.