In taking a systems engineering approach and trying to examine the entire process of remote sensing, image analysis, variablerate prescription generation, on-farm data capture, data and image archival, and information transfer to and from the farm,several bottlenecks are immediately observable. When using satellite collected images, the time from image collection todelivery of the raw image data is too long for practical use in realtime precision agriculture applications. The processing ofremotely sensed images so that they can be used in geographic information systems (GIS) such as ARCView and and imageanalysis software such as Imagine and ENVI is still a time consuming process. The use of fixed wing aircraft for image datacollection currently promises to shorten the delivery time to acceptable margins. As technology improves and the need forcommercial providers of image capture and image analysis grows, it is likely that the market place will provide some answersto this bottleneck.
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