Failure Detection in Row Crops From UAV Images Using Morphological Operators

The detection of failures (DF) in coffee crops is fundamental in evaluating product quality and the optimal occupation of planted areas. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in precision agriculture has great potential as a tool to analyze critical parameters in cultivation, among them the detection of planting failures. This letter presents a novel methodology for DF from aerial images, obtained using a UAV capable of collecting high-resolution RGB images. The proposed approach uses mathematical morphology operators to detect failures over planted areas and returns both the individual positions of these failures and total failure length (sum of empty spaces between plants), thus facilitating decision making for further actions. Results show that the proposed DF method is reliable for accurately identifying failures over rows of planted coffee crops.