Innovative UAV Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Precision agriculture is an internationally recognized concept and term referring to land cultivation by means of nontraditional technologies that were first designed and developed at the end of the 1980s.

The aim of the concept rests in adjusting cultivation procedures to suit local conditions, the main principle being to perform the crop-growing tasks at the right place, intensity, and time.

The optimal crop harvest time differs between individual harvest scenarios, depending on the intended use of the crop and on the technical equipment of the actual farm.

It is therefore economically significant to specify the period as precisely as possible. There is a scientific space which uses a more detail-oriented approach for estimating the correct harvest time; the method focuses on the relationship between ripeness data obtained via photogrammetry and parameters produced by the chemical analysis of the crop.

A corresponding imaging methodology using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a spectral camera allows spectral reflectance values to be obtained and vegetation indices to be calculated.

The topics of interest for this Special Issue include but are not limited to:

• Image processing theory;
• Experimental measurement and validation in the laboratory or in situ;
• Sensing and signal processing of electrical and non-electrical quantities (e.g., images);
• Methods of identifying the type, species and parts of melts, organisms or micro-organisms (crop diseases);
• Mathematical methods and procedures to achieve the above main objectives.

Prof. Dr. Pavel Fiala
Prof. Dr. Petr Marcoň
Dr. Jiri Maxa
Dr. Jiri Janousek
Guest Editors

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• UAV
• measurement
• data transfer
• image evaluation
• image processing
• multispectral imaging
• sensing techniques