Tea Bud Plucking Evaluation Using Small Format Aerial Photograph from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV).

Tea bud quality evaluation is very important for harvest optimalization, at which will correlate to the production enhancement. The short of manpower, large area, and high production cost are the main problem on the evaluation. The aim of this research is to find the effective evaluation method using Unmaned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) attached with Tetracam ADC Lite camera to produce Small Format Aerial Photograph (SFAP) in red, blue and infrared spectral bands. The analysis of some vegetation index showed that: 1) Atmospherically Resistance Vegetation Index (ARVI) and Simple Ratio (SR) are able to compare tea bud and maintenance leaves, 2) The value of SR showed the difference between the bud and the maintenance leaves. Higher SR range (SR =185-242) indicate tea bud, while lower SR range (SR= 109-204) indicate maintenance leaves; at 85.5% accuration, 3) The value of ARVI for maintenance leaves and tea bud are 0 dan 1-126, respectively; at 88.25% accuration. 4) Estimations of tea production using SR dan ARVI methode are not consistent. Coefficient correlations using SR and ARVI are r=0.47 and r=0.26, respectively, 5) However, vegetation index analysis using Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) cannot be used for defferenciate between tea bud and maintenance leaves, where they have the same value of NDVI (NDVI=1). NDVI calculate from the SFAP can only differenciate between tea trees and non vegetation. The results showed that vegetation index analysis using ARVI and SR can be used for plucking evaluation and tea bud production estimation, respectively.