Detecting Defected Crops: Precision Agriculture Using Haar Classifiers and UAV

Abstract

According to recent studies, the world’s population has doubled since 1960. Furthermore, some projections indicate that the world’s population could reach more than ten billion in the next half of this century. As the world is getting increasingly crowded, the ever-growing need for resources is rising. It appears that depletion of natural resources will be three times more than current rates by the mid-century. People would not only consume more resources but also will need more agricultural produce for their everyday life. Hence, in order to meet the ever-increasing demand for farming products, yield should be maximized using top-end technologies. Precision agriculture is the application of technologies and methods to obtain data driven crop management of the farmland. In the middle of the 1980s, precision farming techniques initially were used for soil analysis using sensors and evolved to advanced applications that makes use of satellites, handheld devices and aerial vehicles. Drones commonly referred as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and have been extensively adopted in precision farming. Consequently, in the last two decades, 80 to 90% of the precision farming operations employed UAVs. Accordingly, this paper proposes a prototype UAV based solution, which can be used to hover over tomato fields, collect visual data and process them to establish meaningful information that can used by the farmers to maximize their crop. Furthermore, the findings of the proposed system showed that this was viable solution and identified the defected tomatoes with the success rate of 90%.