A spatiotemporal data acquisition toolkit for volume estimation tools in precision agriculture

Abstract

A data acquisition system for precision agriculture is presented. The system can collects various time-series data on target plants and their environmental facts. The designed system consists of a server and multiple intra-networked stations and includes a software toolkit that has two independent but synchronized data acquisition processes. The one is for measurements on environmental facts around a target plant and the other is for volume estimation of the target plant adopting multi-view stereo techniques. An analysis on sampling rate and data acquisition experiments for testing purposes were performed. A data filtering method based on the fast Fourier transform is applied to analyze the noise immunity of the collected data. For the volume estimation, three different methods, ie, method-I using 2-D projection on slices, method-II using polyhedrons on voxels, and method-III using enclosed surfaces, were devised to handle various plant types and examined for three different type of target plants. The volume estimation errors were measured in range of 6 similar to 30% in the experiments.