Development of a Low-altitude Hyperspectral Imaging System for Measuring Ground Truth in Agricultural Fields

In the hyperspectral analyses over large agricultural fields, it is necessary to utilize the data acquired by high-altitude platform such as satellites or airplanes. However, in the preprocessing stage of the analyses, it is important to provide with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) data acquired on the ground surface, to indicate the ground-truth. In order to obtain the ground-truth hyperspectral data constantly, a low-altitude data acquisition system using a cargo crane with an artificial illumination source is developed. The system can collect data in actual agricultural fields without being seriously affected by the weather condition. Various types of validation data are collected by the system and compared in order to evaluate the performance of the system.