Research on UAV Remote Sensing Method of Mold Detection Suitable for Pericarp of Citri Reticulatae ‘Chachi’ Warehouses

Abstract

Once the Pericarp of Citri Reticulata ‘Chachi’ (PCRC) develops mildew while in storage, the rapid spread of the flora after the occurrence of mold can cause huge losses. As such, inspecting whether the PCRC is moldy is important. In this paper, we propose an alternative inspection method, namely that of utilizing a small UAV with a camera to inspect the PCRC mildew in the top stacks under consideration. Specifically, we first address the light problem in the collected images with different lights via a multi-spectral method, and find that 625–740 nm of lighting has a significant effect on mildew. Second, we utilize the ultrared 1.4R-G method to extract the features of mildew with Otus binarization. We can see that the mold-free area is less than 95% in an image categorized as having mildew. The proposed mildew inspection method achieved 93.3% accuracy. Our method could send the inspection information to a control system, achieving rapid closed-loop automatic control and reducing the mildew-related loss.

Application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Precision Agriculture

“…In agricultural information monitoring, UAVs provide the advantages of high flexibility and a large monitoring range. Yan et al used a small UAV with a camera to detect pericarp mold in a citrus warehouse [9]. They found that the mold was more sensitive to light at 625~740 nm, and the mold features were extracted via infrared 1.4R-G and binarized by Otus.…”