Application of a Low Cost True Reflectance Imaging System to Crop Assessment

The principal objective of this proposal is to transform the SST CRIS (Crop Reflectance Imaging System) from a prototype, whose feasibility has been demonstrated during the Phase I research, to a turnkey, user friendly unit that can be operated by only the pilot of a small aircraft, or by ground operator when carried by a UAV. The images produced by the system are True Reflectance, e.g. they contain properties of the cropped target field only and not a radiance image containing properties of the illumination source and the reflectance properties of the crop target. The emphasis in this research project will be: 1) on the engineering required to improve the three CCD, single lens digital camera and radiometers so that they can be operated by a single operator, 2) on the development of the user friendly software required to control the hardware units and to transform the digital number images into true reflectance images of the single bands, the color IR reflectance composite, and images of various indices derived from true reflectance (NDVI, etc.) representing the crop conditions and 3) on research to establish the environmental and operational conditions under which the acquisition of meaningful data may be expected.