Mobile terrestrial laser scanner vs. UAV photogrammetry to estimate woody crop canopy parameters – Part 2: Comparison for different crops and training systems

Abstract

The measurement of geometric canopy parameters in woody crops is an important task in Precision Agriculture because of their correlation with crop condition and productivity. In recent years, several technological approaches have been developed as an alternative to manual measurements, which are time- and labour-consuming. Two of the most commonly used 3D canopy characterization technologies are mobile terrestrial laser scanning (MTLS) based on light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors, and digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP) using imagery from uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs). Although both are state-of-the-art and have been fully tested and validated, a complete comparison between their geometric canopy parameter estimations in different woody crops and training systems has not been carried out. For this reason, a set of geometric parameters (canopy height, projected area, and volume) of a vineyard, an intensive peach orchard, and an intensive pear orchard were measured using UAV-DAP and MTLS-LiDAR. A comparison between both kinds of measurements was performed, accounting for the length of the sections in which the crop hedgerows were divided to extract the geometric parameters. Measurements from the UAV and the MTLS were highly correlated (R2 from 0.82 to 0.94) when considering the data from the three crops together, and the correlations were higher when analysing longer row sections. The canopy geometric parameters estimated using the MTLS-LiDAR always had higher values than those from the UAV-DAP. The results presented in this work provide useful data for a more informed selection of technological approaches for 3D crop characterization in Precision Fruticulture and high-throughput phenotyping.

Plant phenotyping relevance

UAV-DAPとMTLS-LiDARによる果樹キャノピー形状計測を比較・検証し、高スループット表現型解析への適用可能性を評価しているため、植物形質取得法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The article describes UAV-DAP and MTLS-LiDAR canopy measurements in vineyard, pear, and peach orchards, but no public dataset, imagery, point clouds, code, or model is deposited. The Data availability statement only says the authors plan a future paper with the data, and the supplementary material link is a generic DOI

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