Machine Learning Optimised Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Retrieves Cotton Nitrogen Status

Are unmanned aerial vehicle-based hyperspectral imaging and machine learning advancing crop science?

The past few years have seen increased interest in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and machine learning (ML) in agricultural research, concomitant with an increase in published research on these topics. We provide an updated review, written for agriculturalists, highlighting the benefits in the retrieval of biophysical parameters of crops via UAVs relative to less sophisticated options. We reviewed >70 recent papers and found few consistent results between similar studies. Owing to their high complexity and cost, especially when applied to crops of low value, the benefits of most of the research reviewed are difficult to explain. Future effort will be necessary to distill research findings into lower-cost options for end-users.

Dissection of Hyperspectral Reflectance to Estimate Photosynthetic Characteristics in Upland Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) under Different Nitrogen Fertilizer Application Based on Machine Learning Algorithms

Hyperspectral technology has enabled rapid and efficient nitrogen monitoring in crops. However, most approaches involve direct monitoring of nitrogen content or physiological and biochemical indicators directly related to nitrogen, which cannot reflect the overall plant nutritional status. Two important photosynthetic traits, the fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FAPAR) and the net photosynthetic rate (Pn), were previously shown to respond positively to nitrogen changes. Here, Pn and FAPAR were used for correlation analysis with hyperspectral data to establish a relationship between nitrogen status and hyperspectral characteristics through photosynthetic traits. Using principal component and band autocorrelation analyses of the original spectral reflectance, two band positions (350-450 and 600-750 nm) sensitive to nitrogen changes were obtained. The performances of four machine learning algorithm models based on six forms of hyperspectral transformations showed that the light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM) model based on the hyperspectral first derivative could better invert the Pn of function-leaves in cotton, and the random forest (RF) model based on hyperspectral first derivative could better invert the FAPAR of the cotton canopy. These results provide advanced metrics for non-destructive tracking of cotton nitrogen status, which can be used to diagnose nitrogen nutrition and cotton growth status in large farms.

Estimation of Cotton Leaf Area Index (LAI) Based on Spectral Transformation and Vegetation Index

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) has been increasingly applied to crop growth monitoring due to their advantages, such as their rapid and repetitive capture ability, high resolution, and low cost. LAI is an important parameter for evaluating crop canopy structure and growth without damage. Accurate monitoring of cotton LAI has guiding significance for nutritional diagnosis and the accurate fertilization of cotton. This study aimed to obtain hyperspectral images of the cotton canopy using a UAV carrying a hyperspectral sensor and to extract effective information to achieve cotton LAI monitoring. In this study, cotton field experiments with different nitrogen application levels and canopy spectral images of cotton at different growth stages were obtained using a UAV carrying hyperspectral sensors. Hyperspectral reflectance can directly reflect the characteristics of vegetation, and vegetation indices (VIs) can quantitatively describe the growth status of plants through the difference between vegetation in different band ranges and soil backgrounds. In this study, canopy spectral reflectance was extracted in order to reduce noise interference, separate overlapping samples, and highlight spectral features to perform spectral transformation; characteristic band screening was carried out; and VIs were constructed using a correlation coefficient matrix. Combined with canopy spectral reflectance and VIs, multiple stepwise regression (MSR) and extreme learning machine (ELM) were used to construct an LAI monitoring model of cotton during the whole growth period. The results show that, after spectral noise reduction, the bands screened by the successive projections algorithm (SPA) are too concentrated, while the sensitive bands screened by the shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) are evenly distributed. Secondly, the calculation of VIs after spectral noise reduction can improve the correlation between vegetation indices and LAI. The DVI (540,525) correlation was the largest after standard normal variable transformation (SNV) pretreatment, with a correlation coefficient of −0.7591. Thirdly, cotton LAI monitoring can be realized only based on spectral reflectance or VIs, and the ELM model constructed by calculating vegetation indices after SNV transformation had the best effect, with verification set R2 = 0.7408, RMSE = 1.5231, and rRMSE = 24.33%, Lastly, the ELM model based on SNV-SFLA-SNV-VIs had the best performance, with validation set R2 = 0.9066, RMSE = 0.9590, and rRMSE = 15.72%. The study results show that the UAV equipped with a hyperspectral sensor has broad prospects in the detection of crop growth index, and it can provide a theoretical basis for precise cotton field management and variable fertilization.

Estimation of Paddy Rice Nitrogen Content and Accumulation Both at Leaf and Plant Levels from UAV Hyperspectral Imagery

Remote sensing-based mapping of crop nitrogen (N) status is beneficial for precision N management over large geographic regions. Both leaf/canopy level nitrogen content and accumulation are valuable for crop nutrient diagnosis. However, previous studies mainly focused on leaf nitrogen content (LNC) estimation. The effects of growth stages on the modeling accuracy have not been widely discussed. This study aimed to estimate different paddy rice N traits—LNC, plant nitrogen content (PNC), leaf nitrogen accumulation (LNA) and plant nitrogen accumulation (PNA)—from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based hyperspectral images. Additionally, the effects of the growth stage were evaluated. Univariate regression models on vegetation indices (VIs), the traditional multivariate calibration method, partial least squares regression (PLSR) and modern machine learning (ML) methods, including artificial neural network (ANN), random forest (RF), and support vector machine (SVM), were evaluated both over the whole growing season and in each single growth stage (including the tillering, jointing, booting and heading growth stages). The results indicate that the correlation between the four nitrogen traits and the other three biochemical traits—leaf chlorophyll content, canopy chlorophyll content and aboveground biomass—are affected by the growth stage. Within a single growth stage, the performance of selected VIs is relatively constant. For the full-growth-stage models, the performance of the VI-based models is more diverse. For the full-growth-stage models, the transformed chlorophyll absorption in the reflectance index/optimized soil-adjusted vegetation index (TCARI/OSAVI) performs best for LNC, PNC and PNA estimation, while the three band vegetation index (TBVITian) performs best for LNA estimation. There are no obvious patterns regarding which method performs the best of the PLSR, ANN, RF and SVM in either the growth-stage-specific or full-growth-stage models. For the growth-stage-specific models, a lower mean relative error (MRE) and higher R2 can be acquired at the tillering and jointing growth stages. The PLSR and ML methods yield obviously better estimation accuracy for the full-growth-stage models than the VI-based models. For the growth-stage-specific models, the performance of VI-based models seems optimal and cannot be obviously surpassed. These results suggest that building linear regression models on VIs for paddy rice nitrogen traits estimation is still a reasonable choice when only a single growth stage is involved. However, when multiple growth stages are involved or missing the phenology information, using PLSR or ML methods is a better option.