Content area
Full Text
Precision Agric (2013) 14:478494
DOI 10.1007/s11119-013-9311-z
Yeyin Shi Ning Wang Randal K. Taylor William R. Raun
James A. Hardin
Published online: 9 April 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract Identifying corn plant location and/or spacing is important for predicting yield potential and making decisions for in-season nitrogen application rate. In this study, an automatic corn stalk identication system based on a laser line-scan technique was developed to measure stalk locations during corn mid-growth stages. A laser line-scan technique is advantageous in this application because the line-scan data sets taken from various points of view of a plant stalk results in less interference and higher probability of plant recognition. Data were collected for two 10-meter-long corn rows at the growth stages of V8 and V10 using a mobile test platform in 2011. Each potential stalk cluster was identied in a scan and registered with the same stalks in previous scans. The nal location of a stalk was the average of the measured locations in all scans. The current system setup with data processing algorithms achieved 24.0 and 10.0 % of mean total errors in plant counting at the V8 and V10 growth stages, respectively. The root-mean-squared error (RMSE) between system measured plant locations and manually measured ones were 2.3 and 2.6 cm at the V8 and V10 growth stages, respectively. The interplant spacing measured by the developed system had a good correlation with the manual measurement with an R2 of 0.962 and 0.951 for the V8 and V10 growth stages, respectively. This system can be ultimately integrated in a variable-rate-spraying system to improve real-time, high spatial resolution variable-rate nitrogen applications.
Keywords Corn population In-eld variability Data clustering Variable-rate
technology
Y. Shi N. Wang (&) R. K. Taylor J. A. Hardin
Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering, Oklahoma State University, 111 Agricultural Hall, Stillwater, OK 74078, USAe-mail: [email protected]
W. R. Raun
Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, Oklahoma State University, 044 Agricultural Hall, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA
Automatic corn plant location and spacing measurement using laser line-scan technique
123
Precision Agric (2013) 14:478494 479
Introduction
Nitrogen use efciency (NUE) in cereal production worldwide is as low as 33 % (Raun and Johnson 1999). Much of the nitrogen (N) fertilizer applied to crops is lost to...