Vegetation Index Estimated from a Single Visible Light Image Captured by a Digital Camera on a Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

It has been high-cost work to build a vegetation map by combining a near infrared and visible red images. It might be very convenient and useful for monitoring vegetation area if we can make the vegetation map without any near infrared images.

One of the solutions is to utilize GEI (Green Excess Index) instead of traditional NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index). GEI is also called ‘RGB vegetation index' for it is defined by three visible bands. It was manifested that GEI can discriminate vegetation areas from non-vegetation ones without any near infrared information in the landscape images acquired by an ordinary digital camera on a small multi-copter.