A Method for Recovering Near Infrared Information from RGB Measurements with Application in Precision Agriculture

[size= 13.008px]In this work we develop a cost-efficient coupled dictionary learning based method for reconstructing multispectral images using only a single RGB commercial camera, without requiring the sensitivity function of the camera sensor. Considering the very high cost, the acquisition time and reduced mobility of multispectral cameras we claim that this is a very attractive option. In contrast to other approaches, the proposed method is not limited only to spectral bands inside the visible spectrum, but it also considers an even more challenging task, that is the reconstruction of spectral bands outside the visible range closer to the near-infrared wavelengths of the spectrum. Extensive experiments with real data demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method in the precision agriculture domain. To this end, we calculate one of the most widely used vegetation indices, the normalized difference vegetation index (NVDI), which may be used for plant health monitoring.[/size]