Feasibility of Drone Imagery for Monitoring Performance of a Modified Drill in a Conservation Farming System

In this paper, performance of a no-till corn planter in a soil covered with previous wheat residue was evaluated. Three levels of crop residue cover (CRC): 30, 45 and 60%, two planting schemes; on-bed and in-furrow and two forward speed: (4 and 8 km h-1) were considered as treatments. The field was evaluated by ground and air observations. The purpose of this study was to investigate the capability of aerial images captured by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in identifying the distances between corn seedlings and as a result, assessing the quality of planter performance. Collected data from ground and aerial imagery were used to calculate seed establishment indices including multiple index, miss index, quality of feed index, precision index and also emergence rate index (ERI), for each plot. Images captured from10 m altitude (4.5 mm pixel-1) could give satisfactory results in relation to our objectives. Our results show that acceptable correlations existed between terrestrial and aerial seedlings spacing data sets (0.94<R<0.98) suggesting the aerial imagery is a good choice for evaluating the seed establishment and estimating ERI. Aerial imagery data source underestimated quality of feed and precision indices, overestimated miss index and could not provide processed data range needed for computing multiple index due to low image resolution, weeds presence within crop rows and overlapping of leaves.