A smartphone-based method to measure the maize plant cover

Recent studies have demonstrated the possibility of obtaining an acceptable estimate of the Weed Green Cover (WGC) and therefore of weed developement by simply substracting the Crop Green Cover (CGC) from the Total Green Cover (TGC) measured on a sufficiently high-resolution RGB image. However establishing experimental plots specifically for this purpose increases the time and resources required, thereby limiting the widespread adoption of the method at the farm level. The present study evaluated the possibility of estimating the Single Crop Plant Green Cover (SCPGC) through random samling and image acquisition using a standard smartphone, In this way, we can estimate CGC by multiplying SCPGC by the number of crop plants per unit area, obtained sampling the crop plant number on the field or processing filed images with adequate algorithms.