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Record W4416828415 · doi:10.1016/j.inpa.2025.11.009

Accessible drone image processing for sustainable resource management of 3D tree-like crops using unsupervised algorithms

2025· article· en· W4416828415 on OpenAlex
Khail Alibhai, Jeannifer Labelle, Emmanuel Sulle, Woo Soo Kim

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueInformation Processing in Agriculture · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicRemote Sensing and LiDAR Applications
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsDroneCluster analysisPoint cloudSegmentationRobustness (evolution)Precision agricultureImage segmentationTerrainGraphical user interface

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

• The study presents a precision, training-free crop segmentation algorithm that extracts important phenotypic traits from 3D point cloud data. • We validated the algorithm effectively utilizes advanced clustering techniques, demonstrating strong performance even in densely planted environments. • A user-friendly GUI allows farmers to easily access data, facilitating improved crop monitoring and management for precision agriculture technology. This study presents a novel AI-driven solution designed to enhance sustainable resource management and increase accessibility for farmers through visualized and digitalized tree information. The proposed methodology includes optimizing drone mapping for effective data coverage, capturing high-resolution imagery, and generating a 3D Point Cloud, with a particular emphasis on the integration of Weighted K-means, Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN), and cluster separation algorithms to develop a high-precision, training-free stepwise crop segmentation algorithm for extracting essential phenotypic traits such as crop height and canopy volume. The algorithm was validated using avocado trees in Tanzania and hazelnut trees in Canada, demonstrating its robustness across different tree types and planting conditions. Notably, this study highlights the feasibility of extracting crop height without constructing a Digital Terrain Model (DTM), thereby mitigating errors associated with DTM inaccuracies. The proposed stepwise segmentation algorithm achieved a height estimation R 2 of 0.967 and volume estimation R 2 of 0.91 for avocado trees, demonstrating high accuracy without the need for DTM or training data. The developed algorithm, coupled with a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI), provides farmers with a reliable tool for monitoring crop health and optimizing field management, representing a significant advancement in precision agriculture technology with wide-ranging applicability.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.922
Threshold uncertainty score0.582

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.002
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.002
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.007
GPT teacher head0.248
Teacher spread0.241 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it