A new method for measuring plant canopy nonrandomness and other architectural components has been developed using a 16 bit (65535 gray scale levels) charged-coupled device (CCD) camera that captures images of plant canopies in two wavelength bands. This complete system is referred to as a multiband vegetation imager (MVI). The use of two wavelength bands (visible (VIS) 400-620 nn and near infrared (NIR) 720-950 nm) permits identification of sunlit and shaded foliage, sunlit and shaded branch area, clouds, and blue shy based on the camera's resolution, and the Varying spectral properties that scene components have in the two wavelength bands. This approach is different from other canopy imaging methods (such as fish-eye photography) because it emphasizes measuring the fraction of an image occupied by various scene components (branches, shaded leaves, sunlit leaves) under different sky conditions rather than simply the canopy gap fraction under uniform sky conditions. [Summary provided by the University of Wisconsin-Madison]
MVI
Imaging Spectrometers/Radiometers