Remote Monitoring of Maize Crop through Satellite Multispectral Imagery

This work is aimed at monitoring a Maize crop remotely. The study area has been identified by using appropriate latitudes and longitudes using Earth Explorer site. Three datasets (7 Dec 2013, 8 Jan 2014, 9 Feb 2014) have been acquired from Landsat 8 OLI (Operational Land Imager)/TIRS (Thermal Infrared Sensor) satellite periodically by providing appropriate path and row in order to assess the growing stages of crop. The acquired images are in the form of a set of bands. Appropriate bands are combined to form a multispectral RGB image. This Image is processed in the MATLAB (2011a) Tool. A spectral line graph is plotted by using reflectance data of the specified area of crop. We find that there is high reflectance in green bands during growing stage and this value gets decreased during the near harvesting stage. Also NDVI value has been calculated at each stage. The status of the maize crop has been concluded by experimental analysis at Laboratory and by using NDVI values. It is observed that the crops are healthy.