Regular monitoring and assessment of crops is one of the keys to optimal crop production.\nThis research presents the development of a monitoring system called the Crop Monitoring and\nAssessment Platform (C-MAP). The C-MAP is composed of an image acquisition unit which is an\noff-the-shelf unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a multispectral camera (near-infrared,\ngreen, blue), and an image processing and analysis component. The experimental apple orchard\nat the Parma Research and Extension Center of the University of Idaho was used as the target for\nmonitoring and evaluation. Five experimental rows of the orchard were randomly treated with five\ndifferent irrigation methods. An image processing algorithm to detect individual trees was developed\nto facilitate the analysis of the rows and it was able to detect over 90% of the trees. The image\nanalysis of the experimental rows was based on vegetation indices and results showed that there was\na significant difference in the Enhanced Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (ENDVI) among the\nfive different irrigation methods. This demonstrates that the C-MAP has very good potential as a\nmonitoring tool for orchard management.
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