MiLAND (Multispectral Imaging for Landscapes, Agriculture and Natural Disasters) serves to promote open-source aerial-imaging through the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This project serves to facilitate discussions and the sharing of instructions and links pertaining to camera/sensor selection and image processing, analysis and interpretation.
MiLAND is a project led by Matt Wallhead and Dorn Cox. At this point in time Matt is focused on multispectral image analysis and Dorn is focusing on open-source GIS packages (GRASS, Quantum GIS (QGIS) ect). Together we will attempt to provide an open-source pipeline for image acquisition, processing and analysis.
The name MiLAND stemmed from discussions at the 2013 iFARM event hosted by Dorn Cox of FarmHack at Tuckaway Farms located in Lee, NH. Chris Fastie of Public Labs coined the name iFARM (imaging for agricultural research and management). While discussing dual-rig cameras Jeff Warren of Public Labs suggested adding a M (for multispectral) in front of name. Therefore, MiLAND is an extension of iFARM that focuses on the use of UAV-captured imagery.
Image processing software;
MultiSpec is an excellent tool for multispectral analysis of imagery. The link to the website is provided below.
https://engineering.purdue.edu/~biehl/MultiSpec/
One can easily create NDVI images with just a few clicks. The link to detailed instructions describing the process can be found under the Resources>Tutorials/Exercises section of the website at the following address;
https://engineering.purdue.edu/~biehl/MultiSpec/tutorials/MultiSpec_Exer...
Lots of useful information regarding using digital images to measure plant health can be found on the Digital Earth Watch website found at; http://dew.globalsystemsscience.org/ and provides several freely available software packages that can be used when analyzing standard and NIR imagery. The program AnalyzingDigitalImages is an example of a useful tool for creating NDVI images that can be found through the Digital Earth Watch website. The link to the website is provided below.
https://sites.google.com/a/globalsystemsscience.org/global-systems-scien...
I recently discovered ImageJ (http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/index.html), which is a public domain image processing program funded by NIH. It is a cross-platform program that is able to read many image formats (jpeg, raw, tiff). It appears to be a very powerful program enabled by user-written plugins.
Ned Horning, another Public Lab regular, has written a very nice set of photo monitoring plugins for Fiji (http://fiji.sc/Fiji) which is a distribution of ImageJ (the plugins also work in ImageJ) and can be found at https://github.com/nedhorning/PhotoMonitoringPlugin.
