I was a visiting researcher at the Institute of BIoMETeorology (IBIMET) in Sassari Italy in the month of July 2013. My work there was directed at applying known research from the Richardson lab for using color responses to characterize phenological behavior. You can find the relevant research in this paper.

Research at IBIMET centers on monitoring phenological behavior of the different plant species in the north-west of Sardinia in the Porto Conte – Capo Caccia Nature reserve. The people at IBIMET-Sassari have installed a pan-tilt-zoom camera in a location of interest and have collected images during several months of the species growing in the natural reserve. I have compiled these images in a this movie which shows, among other things, the flowering of a species (around the 8th second). This is picked up by the excess green signal calculated with the Richardson paper concepts.

The gist of my work in Sassari can be summarized in the following figure:

The blue line represents the “raw” signal from the Excess Green Color space on the image series. The red represents the fitted Sigmoid signal. The date is calculated using the inflection point of the Sigmoid and is when the flowering occurred.

We see how the color signal can pick up relevant phenological variations. The idea is to automate the whole process and have an automata go through large amounts of image databases trying to detect these types of behavior.