Artificial Intelligence in Precision Agriculture/Viticulture and Intelligent Monitoring

Joaquim João Moreira de Sousa

The UTAD’s Precision Remote Sensing and Intelligent Sensing for Agriculture and Forestry Management Lab (PRISM-Lab) provides advanced multidisciplinary scientific development where computer science, electronics, chemistry, food science, artificial intelligence, and earth observation are used to tackle selected issues considered to effectively contribute to add value to the agriculture and forest sectors. Techniques, algorithms, and solutions are developed and made available through scientific publications, workshops and patents. PRISM intends to explore a large volume of information made available by space missions, together with new information obtained through the use of UAVs and field sensors. The main goals are: (1) Determine and provide vegetation indices determined from multispectral data to estimate crop’ health and stress; (2) Identify heat stress, water use and plant metabolism using thermography; (3) Assess plant’s phenological state, identify diseases, evaluate water quality, and perform rigorous calculations of vegetation indices, by resorting to hyperspectral sensors; (4) Generate risk maps by means of SAR time series processing, especially those from Sentinel-1 Satellites; (5) Program each agricultural campaign, obtaining data up to March/April and automatically determine all necessary actions/activities; (6) Determine nutrition deficits, water stress, prescriptions, and growth models, by continuously monitoring the vineyards; and (7) Estimate production and plan accordingly, to obtain certain pre-determined quality parameters.