System for monitoring palm tree and oil palm fruitlet thereof in lightweight and efficient manner and method thereof

Abstract

The present invention discloses a system for monitoring a palm tree and an oil palm fruitlet in a plantation in a lightweight and efficient manner and a method thereof. The system comprises a data acquisition module (100), a tree detection module (200), a fruitlet detection module (300), and an environment representation module (400). The data acquisition module (100) comprises a remote sensing device (101) and an image-capturing device (102) mountable to a mobility platform (103) for generating an occupancy grid map associated with the palm tree in the plantation and an image associated with the oil palm fruitlet scattered within a vicinity of the palm tree, respectively. The tree detection module (200) generates a submap from the occupancy grid map to detect the palm tree therein and determine a tree position of the palm tree detected thereof, which is transformed to a global tree position on a semantic or global map. The fruitlet detection module (300) detects the oil palm fruitlet from the image, a fruitlet position, and a quantity of oil palm fruitlets using a grid analysis and transforms the fruitlet position to a global fruitlet position. The environment representation module (400) compares the tree position against a tree tracking list using a chain-based tree-tracking and re-mapping algorithm and assigns a harvest-ready status to the palm tree based on the quantity of oil palm fruitlets detected thereof.