Unmanned aerial vehicles for estimation of vegetation quality

The use of Earth remote sensing (ERS) in agriculture is related with inventory of arable areas, detection of soil erosion, bogging. At present great attention is paid to studies devoted to determination of productivity of arable areas based on ERS data under various climatic conditions. Satellite images are characterized by certain drawbacks such as low resolution, impossibility to acquire images from behind clouds. A promising approach to obtain high precision maps is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The degree of crop development is estimated by their NDVI which is used in numerous photometric instruments for diagnostics of plant nitrogenous nutrition. With this aim, the UAV camera detects plant reflection intensity of sunlight or induced light in red (P NIR) and infrared (P RED) spectra. Thus, it becomes necessary to determine mechanisms and interrelation of vegetation index which would permit to obtain data on crop productivity on the basis of data from UAV.