A drone is used to diagnose crop growth and to provide information through images in the agriculture field. In the case of using high spatial resolution drone images, growth information for each object can be produced. However, accurate object detection is required and adjacent objects should be efficiently classified. The purpose of this study is to develop a Chinese cabbage object detection algorithm using multispectral reflectance images observed from drone and computer vision techniques. Drone images were captured between 7 and 15 days after planting a Chinese cabbage from 2018 to 2020 years. The thresholds of object detection algorithm were set based on 2019 year, and the algorithm was evaluated based on images in 2018 and 2019 years. The vegetation area was classified using the characteristics of spectral reflectance. Then, morphology techniques such as dilatation, erosion, and image segmentation by considering the size of the object were applied to improve the object detection accuracy in the vegetation area. The precision of the developed object detection algorithm was over 95.19%, and the recall and accuracy were over 95.4% and 93.68%, respectively. The F1-Score of the algorithm was over 0.967 for 2 years. The location information about the center of the Chinese cabbage object extracted using the developed algorithm will be used as data to provide decision-making information during the growing season of crops.

Keywords: UAV, Object detection, Crop, OpenCV