UAV-assisted Multi-modal Detection and Severity Assessment for Red Spider Mites in Tea

India is the second largest producer of tea next to China and a key supplier of quality tea to the world market. In order to maintain a consistent yield with rising operational costs, tea growers constantly look for ways to upgrade their management practices where technology presents interesting opportunities to improve quality of interventions with lower overheads. A key challenge in tea is to minimize the impact and damage caused by pests and diseases where Red Spider Mite (RSM) is a prominent pest leading to significant yield losses. We present how Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) assisted spotting of RSM infestation coupled with participatory sensing on the ground can be an efficient approach to detect the severity of infestation. This helps achieve a multi-fold benefit in terms of precise utilization of manpower for stress identification while also giving a view of the extent of curative measures that would be required to overcome the stress. Both the measures would help in limiting costs on resources and agri-inputs thereby driving the operational efficiencies up.