Article Review of Soil Color Detection Using a GPS Enabled Smartphone

It will be covering an article pertaining to soil color using gp gps enabled smartphone applications. So the background from this is that i work with water resources. Im focusing my research on efficiency and Music irrigation. This article covers the collection of soil colored data with gps enabled smartphones, so lets get started. So, since soil color data is widely used in the natural resources field and commercial food production field, this data can be really large and hard to collect, because it is everywhere its all around us, its our land, the vegetation that grows on our land. What we are growing on our land as far as crops and agriculture goes, and so not only that there are other things that we need to detect in the soil, such as iron and organic matter. This is where the collection of the data becomes a huge task, and so for years, weve done it with radar weve done it with cameras and specialized sensors from the sky, mostly with the introduction of uavs. This has become a quicker process, but still tedious. Nonetheless. So what these folks here have done by trying to use gps collected data is by making it a little bit more accessible, as well as a little bit more easy to collect, rather than flying a drone or having a drone some places they need a license. They wanted to use something we all have, which is a smartphone and a sensor, a relatively accurate but small sensor to collect the soil colored data.

The article was written by several people: roxanne stiglitz, elena mikhailova christopher post mark schlaumann, julia sharp roy pargus, benjamin glover and jack mooney. This article was published in the geoderma journal, so this is some of the methodology that they went through ill just cover some of the um missing color tables and the values associated with them and thats. What the chart is on the right. The values on the left are what the scanner has picked up itself. They used a very simple android, developer kit, regular sdk, to create the program and the application so mind you. This is an application that we can use on our smartphones. Hence why it looks like a cell phone image on the left and the sensor is connected to the cell phone through gps. I mean through bluetooth, sorry about that and it does have gps locations tied to it. So theres an advantage there, because with um traditional scans, we would need to geo reference those images and the soil color data. Now. The other advantage is that we are on the ground, and so not only are we getting the sensor data but were getting our visual data from people being on the ground as well. Of course, this has its limitations being that we need to have someone there, but the fourth thought is that they believe that people will already be there to survey the land or to get an idea of the study area, even if they have to fly the land.

Theyre going to be there anyway, so they can visually inspect the soil and the color, the soil and the vegetation in the area. So they use the monsoon muscle, color, chart and thats what theyre going to use to formulate their color chart within the application. So itll be based off of something that a lot of gis people and vegetation professionals already are familiar with. So this is the sensor on the right. This is the nyx pro color sensor. So this is about how easy it would be to collect the data placing the sensor on the ground, collecting the data, sending it to the phone through bluetooth and then running it through the color chart. So the first, the methodology of their research was very simple: develop the color application interrogate integration of color systems into the color application. So this is what i meant by using the monsoon muscle color chart and then testing the color application so making sure that the sensors were using the values given to them to code and color the data accurately, so the sensor is also low cost. This is the advantage of having someone on the ground is that the sensor wouldnt be much of a cost. Of course wed have the people out there, but one at one time or another on a project. Youre gon na have people at the site. So after theyve collected all the data and after they tested the application, they ran it through and they put values to it and then they went and tested it against a flown or flight scanned area, color coded it as we traditionally would, with a radar scan or Camera sensor scan and used that to compare to their nyx pro color sensor, data with the smartphone application and the euclidean distance is meaning that chips away from the measured value to the actual value, so theyre measuring the difference directly and so on average.

The uh soil on dry, the chips difference on dry soil was about two chips. Away is how they refer to it and then on other soil. It was roughly about an average of four color chips away. So not not bad at all. It was pretty accurate and it did it over and over so it was repeatable, it wasnt um a one time. This got the shot kind of thing. It was a reliable source of data for the color system. So that being said, lets move on to the last slide now, in conclusion, they realized and and were aware. This was like one of the things they wanted to prove was that this method of data collection was faster and cheaper and thats. One thing they wanted because they need more of this data and, as the land changes theyre going to continue to be collecting the data. The like, i said earlier, the colors tested to the known mscc colors were only two chips away on dry soils. The last two tests that they did, comparing to known soil colors, were, on average, four color chips away. So this is pretty accurate in terms of whats being collected on the ground, with a low cost sensor compared to scanning or drone flights, and the data uses for this type of application are immense, theres, also the ability to tie gps location to the scans directly theres. The accuracy of the gps phone is not as great as we would like it to be or need to be, but but with the added benefit of bluetooth, the gps location through the smartphone can be improved and those are some of the main benefits to the system And the article was very interesting.

I did like that theyre trying to find more cost effective ways to collect this data. I wasnt sure on the sensors that they were using because they were put on the ground or, if theyre, a camera sensor. There was mention of another sensor that they used, but their focus was the nyx pro. I think this research could be in continued to include not only soil color but vegetation and water, maybe even something that is measuring. So i know theres talks of indoor gps measurement, but i know the uh since the antenna on our jeep on our phones for gps is not as accurate, and we only get down to about five meters if that on a clear day. So theres theres more things that we can pull from our smartphones to enable us to collect this data faster and thats, something that i would like to see.