National Agricultureand Food Research Organization

Food and Agriculture for the Future

Issues and Problems on Data Integration of Agricultural BigData using UAV

Atsushi ITOHNational Agriculture and Food Research Organization

Introduction

Agricultural Big‐Data projects in Japan

• Social Big Data Platform Project (2014‐2018)• National Institute of Information and Communications 

Technology (NICT)

• CREST (2016‐2022)• Japan Science and Technology Agency

Field Sensing using UAV

Experimental field Actual fields

Field Monitoring by UAV on farmers’ fields

Tokachi Area in Hokkaido(Large-Scale Farming Area in Japan)

UAV

enRoute inc. Zion QC630

• Weight：3.2kg• Flight Time：15-20min• Flight Distance：10km• Payload：2.0kg

Farmer’s field

Crop: WheatArea：4haFlight time：7minNumber of shots: 90pics, 910MB(JPG), 2.2GB(RAW)

Crop: Azuki bean,Sugar Beet, Potato

Area: 7haFlight time：7+6min(Twice)Number of shots: 180pics

PotatoArea：5haFlight time：9minNumber of shots:

120pics

WheatArea：4haFlight time：7minNumber of shots: 95pics

WheatArea: 4.5haFlight time: 8minNumber of shots:

110pics

UAV flight plan (2015)

Target: 5 fields (25ha)Date：5/25, 6/2, 6/10, 6/19, 6/25, 7/2, 7/10, 7/16, 7/24, 8/7, 8/19, 9/3, 9/15, 10/6 （14 times)

Camera：SONY α6000 (ILCE‐6000), 4000x6000 pixels, 350dpi

Flight altitude：100mGround speed：7‐8m/sShooting interval：2sec eachGround resolution：2.5cm

Flight Plan

Mission Planner (Open Source, GPLv3)

Orthomosaic Generation

Agisoft PhotoScan (Commercial Software)

Orthomosaic Generation

for 5ha fields:120 pictures1GB (JPG), 3GB(RAW)

GeoTiff, Tiling

GeoTiff

Tiled Picsfor Google Maps

View on Google Maps

Detect the crop quality variation

・Wheat yellow mosaic virus (left fig.)・Lodging (right fig.)

Summary

• To shoot image by UAV is not so difficult• Automatic flight• 10min for 5ha field

• To manage image data is very hard• Takes many hours to gain orthomosaic image• Big storage, Powerful CPU

• Improve farming?• Decision support system?

Field Phenotyping for plant breeding

UAV

DJI: Phantom 3

Litchi (Mission Hub for DJI Drones)

Pictures taken by UAV(Phantom3)Altitude: 10m

Experimental field(Sugar beet)

Orthomosaic generation 

Success Failure

Hillside orchard

Mandarin orange fieldson steep sloping land

DJI: Matrice 600Payload: 6kgFlight time: 18-40min

CameraDJI: ZENMUSE X5R

RTK-GPS options

UAV with RTK‐GPS

Flight planner

Summary

• We could operate UAV in various environments• Generate flight plan automatically• Automatic operation• Experimental fields, sloping fields

• 3D reconstruction, many problems to be solved• Breeding fields• Sloping orchard

• High resolution images are desirable• General cameras are not enough

Future work

• The key is high‐resolution images• How to flight• Which equipment  we should select

• Environment for BigData management• Storage• Database• System to create metadata

• Environment for data analysis• 3D reconstruction• ….

Acknowledgment

This research has been carried out in CREST Program(Japan Science and Technology Agency). Also this work was supported by “Social Big Data Platform Project” (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology).