In Flanders, fruit-growing is an important and key economic activity. Fruit orchard productivity monitoring and a site specific management becomes more important than ever due the increasing demand for uniform batches of quality fruits and the reduced use of pesticides and fertilizers for environmental sustainability. The common way to acquire tree productivity information is through visual inspections. But these traditional techniques are subjective, demanding and also time consuming.

The HyperTemp project aimed to develop an optimized orchard tree productivity monitoring system by integrating multi-date and multi-sensor remote sensing (RS) and in-situ data. Image processing technology have us the ability to automate the visual inspections in orchards. 

An accurate remote sensing productivity monitoring system provides the opportunity to increase profitability and reduce the environmental effects of farming by more closely matching the application of inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers with actual conditions in specific parts of the field.

Stephanie Delalieux, Senior R&D Professional - Precision Agriculture

The hypothetical ‘optimal’ plant vitality remains a theoretical concept. However, it is generally accepted that plants experiencing stress differ in some characteristics (e.g., biomass, LAI, biochemical parameter content, and photosynthetic efficiency) from plants growing under optimal conditions, and these characteristics can therefore be considered as indices of productivity.

The HyperTemp consortium developed a Hyperalign method for an improved geometric preprocessing of UAV data and new data fusion techniques of multitemporal, multimodal aerial images based on tensor decomposition for better understanding of the crop growth states.

From the project results, we could preliminary conclude that for a good yield, the combination of following parameter values is needed: 

• high chlorophyll content at the beginning of the season, low chlorophyll content at the end of the season
• limited biomass growth during the season (July, August) – possible link to PRI
• high water content throughout the season for higher fruit weight