A compact multispectral image capture unit for deployment on drones

Abstract

The design, implementation and evaluation of a lightweight portable multispectral imaging system for deployment on drones is presented in this paper. The dual cameras used enable concurrent capture of red, green, blue (RGB) and near-infrared (NIR) images using simultaneous triggering. The images are stored in native file generated format. A global positioning system (GPS) connected to the camera's controllers enables geo-tagging of the images via exchangeable image file format (EXIF) metadata. A second-order polynomial has been utilized in order to align and test the RGB and NIR images to attain subpixel accuracy. The system was implemented in the matrix laboratory (MATLAB) and the developed algorithm was verified for accuracy considering different environmental conditions and scenarios.