Geometric and Radiometric Consistency of Parrot Sequoia Multispectral Imagery for Precision Agriculture Applications

Abstract

This paper is about the geometric and radiometric consistency of diverse and overlapping datasets acquired with the Parrot Sequoia camera. The multispectral imagery datasets were acquired above agricultural fields in Northern Italy and radiometric calibration images were taken before each flight. Processing was performed with the Pix4Dmapper suite following a single-block approach: images acquired in different flight missions were processed in as many projects, where different block orientation strategies were adopted and compared. Results were assessed in terms of geometric and radiometric consistency in the overlapping areas. The geometric consistency was evaluated in terms of point cloud distance using iterative closest point (ICP), while the radiometric consistency was analyzed by computing the differences between the reflectance maps and vegetation indices produced according to adopted processing strategies. For normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), a comparison with Sentinel-2 was also made. This paper will present results obtained for two (out of several) overlapped blocks. The geometric consistency is good (root mean square error (RMSE) in the order of 0.1 m), except for when direct georeferencing is considered. Radiometric consistency instead presents larger problems, especially in some bands and in vegetation indices that have differences above 20%. The comparison with Sentinel-2 products shows a general overestimation of Sequoia data but with similar spatial variations (Pearson’s correlation coefficient of about 0.7, p-value < 2.2 × 10−16).