What I want to do
I'm an agronomist, I'm going to make a IR RaspiCam to do an IR Timelapse in greenhouse. I want add same sensors (temperature, moisture, soil moisture) at the IR Raspicam in order to link environmental condition to Health of the plant.
I wrote this previous research note https://publiclab.org/notes/LaPa/12-03-2015/how-do-i-set-a-costum-white-balance-of-the-noir-modulo-cam
My attempt and results
I built a IR camera + blue filter (# 2008) by Raspberry Pi in order to have the time lapse movies of growing plants in greenhouse. I would like especially to detect the water stress or the micro water stress during the stage of growing of the plant o during the day. So I placed the IR camera in a greenhouse at the first stage of growing of the plants of cucumber. The camera use a custom white balance according to https://publiclab.org/notes/LaPa/12-03-2015/how-do-i-set-a-costum-white-balance-of-the-noir-modulo-cam
I posted my first attempts with IR on youtube: the first one portrays 3 water stressed plants of primula just after water supply. Indeed you can see in the time lapse movie the leaves of the plants to increase their turgor as clear demonstration of the reduction of water stress.
Here is the movie by raw IR photo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=545sW7hBGVM
I use "ImageJ (FiJi)" + "photo monitoring plugin" to elaborate raw IR photos into NDVI by using InfraBlue.lut that you can see here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUKliCFogxA.
Here you can see the transformation into NDVI using VGYRM.lut https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs8DS24s9j4
Here the timelapse of the first 7 days of the cucumber plants in greenhouse resulting from raw IR photos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdglYb19DmM
And here that timelapse transformed into NDVI using VGYRM.lut https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAuAU7f2NvE
Questions and next steps
Now I am keeping to shoot photos of the growing cucumber plants in greenhouse. I'm going to elaborate those into NDVI again.
Have that sense for my goals? Could this technique be proper for detecting the water stress of the plants?
Am I going in the right direction?
Any suggestions?
If is it necessary I can send some single photos that I used for my time-lapses
If you consider useful to use Raspberry pi for IR green plant analysis, where I can post some images that I shoot?
Thanks in advance
Best regards by LaPa
Why I'm interested
1) Learn more about IR Images of the plants; 2) to identify by IR Images of the plants best of growing condition or the moments of the worst health (water stress) of the plants during their growth; 3) to use IR Raspicam on aerostatic baloon; 4) To build DIY weather tools by Raspberry Pi
26 Comments
Hi LaPa,
Your time-lapse videos are impressive. These are excellent teaching videos. You can clearly see that the NDVI values for the foliage of the plants changes dramatically through the day. It is likely that these changes are not due to physiological changes in the plant (stress, growth, productivity), but instead to changes in the ambient light and/or camera settings. There are probably also changes in the plant health during these periods of time, but they are too subtle to see. These changes in plant health might produce a change in NDVI of maybe 0.05 or 0.1 or so if the plant was stressed by heat or drought. The color gradients you used have approximately the same color for NDVI values of (e.g.) 0.4 and 0.45, so the color of a plant leaf might not change much if it was actually stressed.
To allow a video like these to show plant stress, a few things must happen:
There are not enough colors to differentiate all the NDVI values between 0.2 and 0.8 with enough resolution to detect small changes in plant health. So a special lut could be used to differentiate changes in NDVI between (e.g.) 0.5 and 0.3 using all the obvious colors.
Chris
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Hi @LaPa, great to see your note! I'm tagging some other raspberry pi developers @rjstatic and @seankmcginnis
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