Applications of Thermal Imaging in Agriculture – A Review

In thermal imaging, the invisible radiation pattern of an object is converted into a visible image. This two-dimensional temperature mapping technique has potential for characterizing products during several operations of agricultural and food industries. Thermal imaging has been successfully adopted for studying plant physiology, irrigation scheduling, and yield forecasting in agricultural fields. Likewise maturity evaluation, detection of bruises in fruits and vegetables, detection of spoilage in agricultural produces by microbial activities, and detection of foreign materials are the potential post-harvest operations to use thermal imaging. This paper presents the fundamentals of infrared thermal imaging and a review of applications of thermal imaging in pre-harvest and post-harvest operations of agriculture.