Unmanned Aerial System (UAS)-Based Panicle Size Extraction for Grain Sorghum Yield Estimates.

Unmanned Aerial System (UAS)-Based Panicle Size Extraction for Grain Sorghum

Yield Estimates

Advances in Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) platforms and sensor technology allows collection of in-field crop data at high spatial and temporal resolution. Combined with custom computer algorithms they provide a unique opportunity to advance UAS technology for high throughput plant phenotyping and agriculture research. Specifically, plant breeders and agriculture researchers could benefit from the ability to gather high resolution, temporal data of field-grown crops throughout the growing season, increasing in-field phenotypic data collection efficiency while decreasing overall activity costs. A UAS platform was used to collect high-resolution imagery from a set of genotypes from the Texas A&M Sorghum Breeding Program. Data collection occurred approximately every seven days throughout the growing season to monitor crop growth and development. The basic platform, data collection procedure, and feature (panicle size) extraction will be briefly discussed. Ultimately, the correlation between UAS-extracted panicle size and ground truth data will be examined, as well as their relationship with final sorghum yield.