VHR In Agriculture

Agriculture is one of the major sustaining factors for most of the countries’ economies. It provides the most important human need; food, provides raw materials for various products and is also a source of employment to a majority of the population. Crop farming is a form of agriculture where different types of crop plants are grown over a period of time, and are later harvested as food. Most farmers especially in the developing countries practice small-holder farming and are still using traditional methods of agriculture, where use of new technology and machinery is less of an option. This is mainly due to lack of finances and knowledge on modern methodologies that can improve their crop yields. Technological advancement is evident in all

Weeds often results to high production costs as they are hard to control leading to either low crop yields or increased environmental degradation due to poor weed control methods. The development of tools that can be used for weed control is very slow. In order to ensure high production at a low cost while at the same time ensuring good maintenance of the economies and the environment, more pressure has been put by creating an opportunity to engineers and scientists to work together and find a solution to weed management in crops (Pierce & Clay, 2007). To ensure increased food security and economic growth, there is need to look for weed management approaches that will have a positive effect to the cropping systems even in the

There is need to monitor the growth of the weeds from the seedling level rather than when they are already grown and much hard to control. Satellites that provide very high resolution images of up to <1m are available and they allow detailed and exhaustive mapping (Rougier, Puissant, Stumpf, & Lachiche, 2016). On the other hand, images from UAVs are more advantageous compared to satellite images and even airborne images as they are cheap, they have a higher spatial-temporal resolution and therefore can be used to monitor weeds from their early stages of growth. They are also good for mapping weeds during their late stages because of the high spatial resolution. It is also possible to set the UAV flight route at a low altitude which results in highly overlapping images with higher spatial resolution that vary within a few centimeters (Pérez-Ortiz et al., 2015). The main challenge in UAVs is that their use is not allowed in some countries due to security