Farm-Copter: Computer Vision Based Precision Agriculture

摘要

The agricultural practices in India dates back to the Indus Valley Civilizations and even before that in some parts of southern India. India is considered to be having the second rank worldwide in farm products. Agricultural exports also add to the Indian economy. Those farmers having large plantations face various difficulties during their agricultural routines. These difficulties include identifying the time of harvest of the crops, protecting the crops from pest attacks, preventing the outspread of diseases in crops, determining the moisture content of the soil, etc. The usual measures taken against these problems include the use of pesticides, insecticides, etc., and the use of manual labor for inspecting the growth of the crops and attacks on the crops by rodents. Checking each and every crop manually is practically not possible and is surely a time-consuming process that demands a great amount of manual labor. This project aims to implement a system that makes the above-mentioned tasks easier and more convenient for the farmers. The initial aim of the project is to implement a system using a quadcopter and different image processing techniques that enable us to monitor the crops and provide information regarding the crops thereby reducing the manual labor for the same. A quadcopter fitted with the camera captures the images of the crops, these images are then processed using suitable application software and the information regarding the crops are provided to the farmer to take necessary actions. The future extension of the project includes identification of diseased crops, identification of pest or rodent attack, surveillance in plantations, etc.