System and Method for Image-Based Remote Sensing of Crop Plants

Methods for image-based remote sensing of crop plants include: acquiring images of the crop plants from a camera flown over the crop by an unmanned/uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV); forming an artificial neural network (ANN); and using the trained ANN to identify and/or measure one or more phenotypic characteristics of the crop plants in the images by classification and/or regression; and/or obtaining multispectral images of the crop plants from a multispectral camera flown over the crop by the UAV; mosaicking the multispectral images together; determining crop measurement metrics; crop height model (CHM), crop coverage (CC) and crop volume (CV) representing the crop plants in three dimensions from a fusion of a digital surface model and a digital terrain model; determining various vegetation indices (VIs) based on the multispectral orthomosaic reflectance map; and determining a measurement of dry biomass using CV and fresh biomass using CV×VIs.