Research Objectives

A study design to optimize the collection, radiometric characterization, and processing of multispectral data acquired by UAS. To accomplish this, we will answer the following questions:

• What is the best time of day to acquire the data?
• What is the optimal resolution to resolve the objects of interest while minimizing adjacency issues, geometric distortion, and the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF)? This is also directly related to the flight height, which determines the spatial resolution or ground sampling distance.
• What is the best practice for radiometric calibration of visible and near-infrared light (non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation)?
• What is the best processing pipeline to convert the raw digital numbers (DNs) collected by the multispectral camera to surface reflectance?