Applications of UAV Thermal Imagery in Precision Agriculture: State of the Art and Future Research Outlook

Abstract

Low-altitude remote sensing (RS) using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a powerful tool in precision agriculture (PA). In that context, thermal RS has many potential uses. The surface temperature of plants changes rapidly under stress conditions, which makes thermal RS a useful tool for real-time detection of plant stress conditions. Current applications of UAV thermal RS include monitoring plant water stress, detecting plant diseases, assessing crop yield estimation, and plant phenotyping. However, the correct use and interpretation of thermal data are based on basic knowledge of the nature of thermal radiation. Therefore, aspects that are related to calibration and ground data collection, in which the use of reference panels is highly recommended, as well as data processing, must be carefully considered. This paper aims to review the state of the art of UAV thermal RS in agriculture, outlining an overview of the latest applications and providing a future research outlook.

Code and data availability

This is a review article on UAV thermal imagery in precision agriculture. It presents no paper-specific public phenotype datasets, imagery deposits, analysis code, or trained models. The authors' own data (e.g., onion field RGB/thermal orthomosaics, GCP target photos) are shown as figures but no repository or deposit/с

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