Phenotyping system for precise monitoring of potato crops during growth

A phenotyping system was developed for monitoring the growth of 3 Japanese and 5 European varieties of potatoes. From the UAV images taken weekly, plant height, volume and vegetation indices were estimated from the DSM and the reflectance maps. UAV-estimated volume and manually measured plant height had a high correlation with a coefficient of determination R2 of 0.70. UAV estimated NDVI was highly correlated with the manually measured NDVI (correlation coefficient of R = 0.97). European varieties such as Euroviva had a higher volume compared to the Japanese varieties such as Irish cobbler and Toyoshiro. Volume and LCI were found to be highly correlated with the yield ( R2 of 0.99 and 0.96) thus ideal parameters for yield prediction.