| This work concentrates on the topic of remote sensing using a multispectral imaging system for water management and agriculture applications. The platform, which is a light-weight inexpensive runway-free unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), namely, AggieAir, is presented initially. A major portion of this work focuses on the development of a light-weight multispectral imager payload for the AggieAir platform, called GhostFoto. The imager is band-reconfigurable, covering both visual red, green, and blue (RGB) and near infrared (NIR) spectrum, and interfaced with UAV on-board computer. The development of the image processing techniques, which are based on the collected multispectral aerial images, is also presented in this work. One application is to perform fully autonomous river tracking for applications such as river water management. Simulation based on aerial multispectral images is done to demonstrate the feasibility of the developed algorithm. Other effort is made to create a systematic method to generate normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) using the airborne imagery. The GhostFoto multispectral imaging system based on AggieAir architecture is proven to be an innovative and useful tool. |
