OPTIMIZING RADIOMETRIC PROCESSING AND FEATURE EXTRACTION OF DRONE BASED HYPERSPECTRAL FRAME FORMAT IMAGERY FOR ESTIMATION OF YIELD QUANTITY AND QUALITY OF A GRASS SWARD

Abstract. Light-weight 2D format hyperspectral imagers operable from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have become common in various remote sensing tasks in recent years. Using these technologies, the area of interest is covered by multiple overlapping hypercubes, in other words multiview hyperspectral photogrammetric imagery, and each object point appears in many, even tens of individual hypercubes. The common practice is to calculate hyperspectral orthomosaics utilizing only the most nadir areas of the images. However, the redundancy of the data gives potential for much more versatile and thorough feature extraction. We investigated various options of extracting spectral features in the grass sward quantity evaluation task. In addition to the various sets of spectral features, we used photogrammetry-based ultra-high density point clouds to extract features describing the canopy 3D structure. Machine learning technique based on the Random Forest algorithm was used to estimate the fresh biomass. Results showed high accuracies for all investigated features sets. The estimation results using multiview data provided approximately 10 % better results than the most nadir orthophotos. The utilization of the photogrammetric 3D features improved estimation accuracy by approximately 40 % compared to approaches where only spectral features were applied. The best estimation RMSE of 239 kg/ha (6.0 %) was obtained with multiview anisotropy corrected data set and the 3D features.