Comparison of Conventional Tillage and No-Tillage Cotton Crop Treatments Using Multi-Temporal UAS Data

Recent years have witnessed enormous growth in application of UAS in precision agriculture. Our study is one such attempt in this direction. We present a novel approach to use multi-temporal Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) data for the comparison of conventional tillage and no-tillage cotton crop treatments. The parameters considered for the comparison are: canopy height, canopy cover, canopy volume and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Initially, the whole study area is divided into approximately one square meter size grids. All the measurements are taken grid wise using high resolution UAS data captured over ten epochs during the life period of the cotton crop. Further, one tailed test hypothesis is designed to perform the statistical comparison using equal number of samples collected for both conventional tillage and no-tillage treatments. Experimental results reveal that there is a significant difference between conventional tillage and no-tillage cotton crop treatments for almost all the epochs. With 95% confidence interval, No-tillage treatment is found to have taller canopy, higher canopy cover, bigger biomass and higher NDVI as compared to conventional tillage treatment.