I love it when a plan comes together….
In the last few weeks, I’ve been working with a lot of
precision agriculture data of ALL kinds. No one project is the same and if I reveal anything about them, well, I’d have
to kill you. Except for one. Our Airbus DS co-marketing activities, those I can
discuss. I recently delivered a webinar on using Pleiades imagery in our ENVI Toolkit for Precision agriculture. The
webinar focused on plant counting and using USDA Cropland data layers to find
fields of interest. Sky Rubin at Airbus Co presented as well, and we’ll be showing demos of this at the ESRI UC so be
sure to find us (or we’ll find you).
Anyways, when I first got my hands on the plant counter it
was an earlier version and I, being new to it, was perhaps not keying in the
best parameters as seen below. But I was
still getting 95% accuracy on a grape vineyard. The plant centers aren’t quite perfect, but still decent to get a count.
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Enter the new and improved 1.0 version—I dare you to find a
missed plant. Austin Coates, one of our
consultants and Plant Finder auteur, tightened up a few things to get these
results.
Then Zach Norman, Sales engineer extraordinaire, asked what
if I could pull an average vegetation index value. Drops mic.
When you do things like this and people see your work, you
realize the value of being in a collaborative environment—you can feed off of
each, motivate each other to ask questions, and find different ways of doing
things. Here we go from ok counts, to
better counts, to water/fertilize/do something to that grape plant right now!
In boutique crops like viticulture where the value of each plant is so high, a
look like this can be incredible useful for plant monitoring. For a lower value crop like corn, more
regional information is fine and useful because management occurs more from the
field level than the plant.
And the ENVI Toolkit for Precision Agriculture is
available. It’s a library that runs with
ENVI+IDL or ENVI Services Engine. Cost
is $3,500. You can use it yourself or our services team can integrate it into
your existing cloud or ArcGIS for Server environment. Drop me a line with questions.
Follow me @asoconnor