Introducing Multispectral-Depth (MS-D): Sensor Fusion for Close Range Multispectral Imaging

In this work, we present a Multispectral-Depth (MS-D) system for close range multispectral imaging comprised of a multispectral camera and an RGB-D camera. The proposed system outputs a multispectral point cloud, enabling robust and accurate calculation of numerous vegetation indices. The accuracy of the MS-D system is quantitatively compared with the state-of-the-art methods for close range multispectral imaging. The analysis shows that MS-D outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches with additional advantage of high invariance to the environmental conditions. Contrast to the state-of-the-art feature matching approaches, this system, once calibrated, is applicable as is, without the need for recalibration. The accompanying method for autonomous extrinsic calibration of the system, which extends the capabilities of previous approaches, is also presented.