The information on biophysical parameters—such as height, crown area, and vegetation indices such as the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and normalized difference red edge index (NDRE)—are useful to monitor health conditions and the growth of oil palm trees in precision agriculture practices. The use of multispectral sensors mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) provides high spatio-temporal resolution data to study plant health. However, the influence of UAV altitude when extracting biophysical parameters of oil palm from a multispectral sensor has not yet been well explored. Therefore, this study utilized the MicaSense RedEdge sensor mounted on a DJI Phantom–4 UAV platform for aerial photogrammetry. Three different close-range multispectral aerial images were acquired at a flight altitude of 20 m, 60 m, and 80 m above ground level (AGL) over the young oil palm plantation area in Malaysia. The images were processed using the structure from motion (SfM) technique in Pix4DMapper software and produced multispectral orthomosaic aerial images, digital surface model (DSM), and point clouds. Meanwhile, canopy height models (CHM) were generated by subtracting DSM and digital elevation models (DEM). Oil palm tree heights and crown projected area (CPA) were extracted from CHM and the orthomosaic. NDVI and NDRE were calculated using the red, red-edge, and near-infrared spectral bands of orthomosaic data. The accuracy of the extracted height and CPA were evaluated by assessing accuracy from a different altitude of UAV data with ground measured CPA and height. Correlations, root mean square deviation (RMSD), and central tendency were used to compare UAV extracted biophysical parameters with ground data. Based on our results, flying at an altitude of 60 m is the best and optimal flight altitude for estimating biophysical parameters followed by 80 m altitude. The 20 m UAV altitude showed a tendency of overestimation in biophysical parameters of young oil palm and is less consistent when extracting parameters among the others. The methodology and results are a step toward precision agriculture in the oil palm plantation area.

Malaysia currently is one of the biggest global producers and exporters of palm oil. The world’s expanding oil palm plantation areas contribute to climate change and in-return, climate is change also affecting the health of oil palms through a range of abiotic and biotic stresses. Current advancements in Precision Agriculture research using UAV gives an advantage to detect the health conditions of oil palm at early stages. Thus, remedial actions can be taken to prolong the life and increase oil palms productivity. This paper explores the use of UAV derived NDVI and CPA of young oil palm to detect the health conditions. NDVI of individual oil palm were extracted using ground masking layer from the dense point clouds and visual on-screen manual editing was done for removing trees other than oil palm in ENVI software. The classified individual crown NDVI were then processed to extract the mean NDVI also conversion to vector to obtain the individual crown outline. Extracted mean NDVI was classified into un-healthy and healthy trees while the CPA was classified into small, medium and big size classes. These classes of NDVI and CPA were analysed using GIS overlay method thus revealing the spatial patterns of individual oil palm trees and its health conditions. Overall, the majority of oil palm trees of the study area are healthy but average performing. However, few oil palm trees detected having health problems which has low NDVI and small CPA. This study demonstrates that biophysical parameters such as the CPA can be used to detect individual young oil palm trees health conditions and problems when combined with vegetation indices such as NDVI.