UAV-Based Heating Requirement Determination for Frost Management in Apple Orchard

Frost is a natural disaster that can cause catastrophic damages in agriculture, while traditional temperature monitoring orchards has disadvantages such as being imprecise and laborious, which lead to inadequate or wasteful frost protection treatments. In this article, we presented heating requirement assessment methodology for an apple orchard utilizing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based thermal RGB cameras. A image stitching algorithm using the BRISK feature was developed creating georeferenced maps, attained sub-centimeter map resolution speed of 100 images within 30 s. YOLOv4 classifiers six flower bud growth stages various network sizes were trained based on 5040 images, best model achieved 71.57% mAP test dataset consisted 360 images. mapping classifier detection results into dense stage maps geoinformation. Heating created artificial critical temperatures simulate demands during events. The demonstrated feasibility proposed determination methodology, potential be component autonomous, precise management system future studies.