RT Journal Article
T1 A Methodology for the Automated Delineation of Crop Tree Crowns from UAV-Based Aerial Imagery by Means of Morphological Image Analysis
A1 Ponce Real, Juan Manuel
A1 Aquino Martín, Arturo
A1 Tejada Guzmán, Diego
A1 Al-Hadithi, Basil Mohammed
A1 Andújar Márquez, José Manuel
AB The popularisation of aerial remote sensing using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), hasboosted the capacities of agronomists and researchers to offer farmers valuable data regardingthe status of their crops. This paper describes a methodology for the automated detection andindividual delineation of tree crowns in aerial representations of crop fields by means of imageprocessing and analysis techniques, providing accurate information about plant population andcanopy coverage in intensive-farming orchards with a row-based plant arrangement. To that end, afterpre-processing initial aerial captures by means of photogrammetry and morphological image analysis,a resulting binary representation of the land plot surveyed is treated at connected component-level inorder to separate overlapping tree crown projections. Then, those components are morphologicallytransformed into a set of seeds with which tree crowns are finally delineated, establishing theboundaries between them when they appear overlapped. This solution was tested on images fromthree different orchards, achieving semantic segmentations in which more than 94% of tree canopybelonging pixels were correctly classified, and more than 98% of trees were successfully detectedwhen assessing the methodology capacities for estimating the overall plant population. According tothese results, the methodology represents a promising tool for automating the inventorying of plantsand estimating individual tree-canopy coverage in intensive tree-based orchards
PB MDPI
SN 2073-4395 (electrónico)
YR 2021
FD 2021-12
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10272/22715
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10272/22715
LA eng
NO Ponce, J. M., Aquino, A., Tejada, D., Al-Hadithi, B. M., & Andújar, J. M. (2021). A Methodology for the Automated Delineation of Crop Tree Crowns from UAV-Based Aerial Imagery by Means of Morphological Image Analysis. In Agronomy (Vol. 12, Issue 1, p. 43). MDPI AG. https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy12010043
NO Grant P18-RTJ-4539 funded by the Regional Government of Andalusia and by “PAIDI, PlanAndaluz de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación”Authors would like to thank “Virgen de la Oliva” olive-oil cooperative forgenerously offering their orchards to conduct this work
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Huelva
RD 31 may 2026