Correcting On-the-Go Field Measurement–Coordinate Mismatch by Minimizing Nearest Neighbor Difference

Many current precision agriculture applications involve on-the-go field measurements of soil and plant properties that require accurate georeferencing. Specific equipment configuration characteristics or data transmission, reception, or logging delays may cause a mismatch between the logged data and the GPS coordinates because of time and position lags that occur during data acquisition. We propose a simple coordinate translation along the measurement tracks to correct for such positional inaccuracies, based on the local travel speed and time lag, which is estimated by minimizing the average ln-transformed absolute difference with the nearest neighbors. The correction method is evaluated using electromagnetic induction soil-sensor data for different spatial measurement layouts and densities and by comparing variograms for raw and modified coordinates. Time lags of 1 s are shown to propagate into the spatial correlation structure up to lag distances of 10 m. The correction method performs best when repeated measurements in opposite driving directions are used and worst when measurements along parallel driving tracks are only repeated at the headland turns. In the latter case, the performance of the method is further improved by limiting the search neighborhood to adjacent measurement tracks. The proposed coordinate correction method is useful for improving the positional accuracy in a wide range of soil- and plant-sensing applications, without the need to grid the data first.