Christopher Reps
Project Team Update
This past week, even though the team wasn’t able to meet, the platform sub-team has decided on a platform to use. The IRIS+, an off the shelf model, will be used to carry a camera and fly over crop fields. One of the several benefits that the IRIS+ offers over a custom built option is that it has been released by a trusted company that consistently produces good quality products. This assures a level of quality that will then be passed along to the farmers when they use our product. Another benefit is the community of IRIS+ users, who have operated the same UAV as we plan to use, and can offer insight to any challenges that we may encounter. Quick problem solving aid is a large advantage compared having to troubleshoot issues on our own with a custom model.
The IRIS+ meets all the basic needs of the team and should be ordered and shipped shortly. After arrival, test flights can begin using both autonomous programming and manually control through the remote. |
Avery Berchek
Journalism Duty
A lot of the team members were busy this week so our meeting was not extremely busy, but a lot of work was still done. For the platform team, the budget was finalized over the past week and during the team meeting it was sent to Dr. Chen and Terry for approval. Hopefully we will hear back soon that way we can order our parts. Once the parts are ordered and arrive, then we will assemble the quad copter and it will be ready to fly! This week another project for imaging was started, the program for isolating the crop fields. This program’s goal is to take a stitched image of all the pictures that the UAV took, run through every pixel and isolate the fields from the rest of that stitched image. Once that is done, the program created earlier which analyzes the crop fields for pierce’s disease will be used to analyze the isolated crop fields. Once the bad parts of the field are found by the locator program then the bad parts will be turned yellow on the stitched image and the program will circle the bad part. This isolation program was just started and is due on November 25, 2014, and after that is complete then the pierce’s disease locator program will be combined with the isolation program. Normal Stitched Image
HSV Version Stitched Image
Outlined Fields Stitched Image
|
Patrick Thavornkant
Imaging Team Progress
Currently the imaging team has done research into analysis of crop fields. We’ve been developing a program to distinguish which parts of a given field are filled with poor crops in contrast to those with good crops. Our current progress allows us to highlight bad crops by altering their pixel values in an image. Currently, our program exists in both Java and C++, which is somewhat of a multi-platform support. Our final product aims to be namely in Java, but a C++ build does exist. We’re aiming for Java because it’s free to develop on, and affordability is key when working on this project. We achieve our results by taking a given image and scanning it as a matrix. We go pixel by pixel and check its’ value to a given threshold (ie, we’re told bad crops in this image are the gray ones, or ‘x’ color, thus we check each pixel for that color) and should they meet that threshold, we change its’ value to something that greatly sticks out in the image so that it is easier to see. Through this method, we can also remove unimportant areas by changing them into background colors. We can do this with images converted into grayscale, as well as RGB images. We are testing our programs with various types of images and are fine tuning them to more accurately identify bad crops and remove areas of disinterest. We’re working on being able to use HSV and heat map analysis to better our results. Below are samples of our programs in action. Sample Images:
Our analysis can also determine the amount of pixel values altered to be highlighted in order to show what percentage of an image is filled with bad crops. We hope to export relevant data for farmers when their UAVs give them images of their field and our program analyzes them. |
