Researchers of the GIScience group of the Institute of Geography of the University of Heidelberg, the Institute for Geoinformatics and Remote Sensing of the University of Osnabrueck and the Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants of the Julius-Kühn-Institut acquired a highly accurate 3D point cloud of harvest residues of winter barley in Brunswick, Germany.
In precision agriculture, detailed local and temporal geoinformation on plant and soil properties plays an important role. Laser scanning has been already used to describe in-field variations of plant growth in 3D and can serve as valuable a complementary topographic remote sensing dataset, e.g. for deriving soil properties from hyperspectral sensors.
Terrestrial laser scanning, a low-cost hyperspectral sensor (Penta-Spek) and a high-end hyperspectral camera were applied to capture a detailed representation of the harvested area and barley residues to classify 3D point clouds into post-harvest residues and bare soil.