Vegetation Mapping by UAV Visible Imagery and Machine Learning

An experimental field cropped with sugar-beet with a wide spreading of weeds has been used to test vegetation identification from drone visible imagery. Expert masked and hue-filtered pictures have been used to train several Machine Learning algorithms to develop a semi-automatic methodology for identification and mapping species at high resolution. Results show that 5m altitude allows for obtaining maps with an identification efficiency of more than 90%. Such a method can be easily integrated to present VRHA, as much as tools to obtain detailed maps of vegetation.