Model: XNiteCanon450NDVI - Canon Rebel 450D 12.2 Megapixel Vegetative Stress Camera
This model has been discontinued and replaced with a higher resolution 3-Band camera Canon 550D NDVI T2i
We have created a vegetation stress camera that allows you to take one picture and get the visible blue light in the blue channel and get the near infrared light the red channel. By evaluating the red and blue channels, you can quickly get information about vegetation as well as minerals, bodies of water, camouflaged object detection and more. Healthy plants have a strong near infrared reflectivity, sometimes called the "Red Edge". Our non-destructive, easy, remote sensing camera allows for quick and accurate analysis. The ratio of the near infrared reflectivity to the visible reflectivity can give you information on the plants health, discern bodies of water, barren land, shrubbery, rainforests, minerals and more. Aerial photographs with our camera can allow farmers to quickly asses the health of their crops spotting disease, sick plants, weeds and other variations.
How to measure vegetation stress with our camera and convert image to a scaled NDVI picture
 | Take a picture with our camera. |
| Using free program ImageJ, process the picture with one of our custom scripts. |
| Look at picture |
Traditionally, the NDVI ratio was calculated with special Kodak infrared film which had the unusual property of the blue channel capturing the infrared and the red and green channel capturing the visible red and green. Kodak has discontinued this film. With our digital camera, the blue channel captures the visible while the red captures the near infrared, which is the reverse of the Kodak film. Taking pictures with our camera and then finding the RGB values for any point using a program such as Photoshop, you can get a direct reading of both near infrared and visible light. Using our camera makes the process simple and easy.
Image from MaxMax vegetation camera with no processing. Blue is visible blue band. Red is near infrared band.
To make the process even easier, you can download a public image processing program developed by the National Instiute of Health, called ImageJ for free. We have written a special program (script) for ImageJ that will automatically convert the picture taken by the MaxMax Vegetation camera into a scaled NDVI image such as show below. We have a few different scripts avaialble for mapping the NDVI data. The picture below was processed with our script NDVI_4 which assigns green to high NDVI values (healthy plants), red to low NDVI values (stressed plants) and blue to negative NDVI values (sky and water).
Plant under stress on left and healthy plant on right.
Visible Picture with normal camera
NDVI picture from MaxMax camera
NDVI picture after processing with ImageJ and our custom script. Notice how the healthy plant has much more green than the unhealth one.
