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Site specific management systems are important tools for farmers and consultants. With these tools, farmers and consultants are better able to document and manage farming zones within a field. Still, obtaining data and making recommendations in a simple and consistent manner, is a laborious task and requires many hours and specially trained personnel. Also, these people must have a host of tools to perform the job. At Louisiana State University, we have been involved with making the data acquisition and processing routines easier to use and more robust in nature.

An area of particular interest is in the creation of software that will allow the reduction of imagery data to useful information with the push of a button. This software will assists in the site specific inspection of agricultural fields providing accurate geo-referencing, so that crop inputs can be regulated. This software will also allow the visual integration of all the data sources tied to an agricultural field and help farmers to identify the within-field variability, and keep a GPS integrated field record to calculate acreage based on field aerial photographs. One of the objectives of this software is to provide low cost methods for farmers and provide a map-based interface to input, edit, manipulate, analyze and display field data both in text and graphic forms. It is a mapping tool to help farmers, provide structure information about the health of the vegetation. This software should be able of detect and analyze chlorophyll and pigmentation by analyzing the NDVI images of the fields.