Development of Field Scale Model for Estimating Garlic Growth Based on UAV NDVI and Meteorological Factors

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has several advantages over conventional remote sensing techniques. They can acquire high-resolution images quickly and repeatedly. And with a comparatively lower flight altitude, they can obtain good quality images even in cloudy weather. In this paper, we developed for estimating garlic growth at field scale model in major cultivation regions. We used the $NDVI_{UAV}$ that reflects the crop conditions, and seven meteorological elements for 3 major cultivation regions from 2015 to 2017. For this study, UAV imagery was taken at Taean, Changnyeong, and Hapcheon regions nine times from early February to late June during the garlic growing season. Four plant growth parameters, plant height (P.H.), leaf number (L.N.), plant diameter (P.D.), and fresh weight (F.W.) were measured for twenty plants per plot for each field campaign. The multiple linear regression models were suggested by using backward elimination and stepwise selection in the extraction of independent variables. As a result, model of cold type explain 82.1%, 65.9%, 64.5%, and 61.7% of the P.H., F.W., L.N., P.D. with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 7.98 cm, 5.91 g, 1.05, and 3.43 cm. Especially, model of warm type explain 92.9%, 88.6%, 62.8%, 54.6% of the P.H., P.D., L.N., F.W. with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 16.41 cm, 9.08 cm, 1.12, 19.51 g. The spatial distribution map of garlic growth was in strong agreement with the field measurements in terms of field variation and relative numerical values when $NDVI_{UAV}$ was applied to multiple linear regression models. These results will also be useful for determining the UAV multi-spectral imagery necessary to estimate growth parameters of garlic.