Monitoring Onion Growth using UAV NDVI and Meteorological Factors

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) became popular platforms for the collection of remotely sensed data in the last years. This study deals with the monitoring of multi-temporal onion growth with very high resolution by means of low-cost equipment. The concept of the monitoring was estimation of multi-temporal onion growth using normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and meteorological factors. For this study, UAV imagery was taken on the Changnyeong, Hapcheon and Muan regions eight times from early February to late June during the onion growing season. In precision agriculture frequent remote sensing on such scales during the vegetation period provided important spatial information on the crop status. Meanwhile, four plant growth parameters, plant height (P.H.), leaf number (L.N.), plant diameter (P.D.) and fresh weight (F.W.) were measured for about three hundred plants (twenty plants per plot) for each field campaign. Three meteorological factors included average temperature, rainfall and irradiation over an entire onion growth period. The multiple linear regression models were suggested by using stepwise regression in the extraction of independent variables. As a result, $NDVI_{UAV}$ and rainfall in the model explain 88% and 68% of the P.H. and F.W. with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 7.29 cm and 59.47 g, respectively. And $NDVI_{UAV}$ in the model explain 43% of the L.N. with a RMSE of 0.96. These lead to the result that the characteristics of variations in onion growth according to $NDVI_{UAV}$ and other meteorological factors were well reflected in the model.