UAV-Based Thermal Inversion for Canopy Temperature Retrieval and Precision Irrigation.

Abstract

Accurate assessment of crop water status is critical for precision irrigation and sustainable water management in agriculture. This study develops a UAV-based thermal infrared inversion framework for high-resolution canopy temperature retrieval and irrigation decision support in tea plantations. The proposed approach integrates multi-frame image mosaicking, threshold-based canopy extraction, and a gray-temperature calibration model to generate spatially continuous canopy temperature maps. Crop water stress was quantified using the Crop Water Stress Index (CWSI), and its reliability was further evaluated by analyzing its relationship with stomatal conductance. The framework further estimates soil moisture status and irrigation requirements based on a threshold-based irrigation strategy. The results show that the linear gray-temperature calibration model achieved a maximum absolute error of less than 0.3 °C and that the calculated CWSI and estimated irrigation requirement were strongly correlated with measured stomatal conductance, with R 2 up to 0.91. The proposed method provides a practical technical workflow from UAV thermal imagery acquisition to canopy temperature retrieval and quantitative irrigation decision-making, demonstrating its potential for precision irrigation management in tea plantations.

Code and data availability

The supplied article blocks describe UAV thermal imagery acquisition, canopy temperature retrieval, and CWSI-based irrigation analysis for a tea plantation, but contain no data availability statement, no public repository deposit, no author code release, and no public URL for datasets, images, or scripts. The paper's 2

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