Design and Verification of a Low-Cost Multispectral Camera for Precision Agriculture Application

With the rapid increase of the world population, climate changes, and the slow expansion of cultivated areas, only precision agriculture (PA) can provide enough food or resources. PA requires flexible instruments for measuring the spectral signatures of the crops to understand their conditions. Unfortunately, the high initial costs of multispectral (MS) cameras reduce the implementation of PA in small farms, which constitute a large portion of arable land in Europe and contribute with social bonds, local know-how, and cultural legacy. With the objective to speed up the use of MS imaging, in this article, we present a novel low-cost imaging device consisting of an MS camera with nine bands and a thermal imager, whose price is several times lower than commercially available ones. This article describes the design and the calibration of the imaging device based on the off-the-shelf components: Raspberry Pi, dedicated quad camera kit, thermal core, and multiband optical filters. The spectr...