See as a Bee: UV Sensor for Aerial Strawberry Crop Monitoring

TL;DR

This paper introduces a UV-based aerial sensing system inspired by bee vision for improved strawberry flower detection in precision agriculture, demonstrating enhanced feature extraction and cost-effective field monitoring.

Contribution

It presents a novel UV-reflectance imaging approach for flower detection, integrating it into a scalable robotic system for efficient crop monitoring.

Findings

UV imaging improves flower detection accuracy

UV-G-B detector outperforms RGB-based methods

Cost-effective aerial monitoring system demonstrated

Abstract

Precision agriculture aims to use technological tools for the agro-food sector to increase productivity, cut labor costs, and reduce the use of resources. This work takes inspiration from bees vision to design a remote sensing system tailored to incorporate UV-reflectance into a flower detector. We demonstrate how this approach can provide feature-rich images for deep learning strawberry flower detection and we apply it to a scalable, yet cost effective aerial monitoring robotic system in the field. We also compare the performance of our UV-G-B image detector with a similar work that utilizes RGB images.