scholarly journals Dual polarimetric radar vegetation index for crop growth monitoring using sentinel-1 SAR data

2020 ◽  
Vol 247 ◽  
pp. 111954 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dipankar Mandal ◽  
Vineet Kumar ◽  
Debanshu Ratha ◽  
Subhadip Dey ◽  
Avik Bhattacharya ◽  
...  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 809 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lijuan Wang ◽  
Guimin Zhang ◽  
Ziyi Wang ◽  
Jiangui Liu ◽  
Jiali Shang ◽  
...  

Remote sensing of crop growth monitoring is an important technique to guide agricultural production. To gain a comprehensive understanding of historical progression and current status, and future trend of remote sensing researches and applications in the field of crop growth monitoring in China, a study was carried out based on the publications from the past 20 years by Chinese scholars. Using the knowledge mapping software CiteSpace, a quantitative and qualitative analysis of research development, current hotspots, and future directions of crop growth monitoring using remote sensing technology in China was conducted. Furthermore, the relationship between high-frequency keywords and the emerging hot topics were visually analyzed. The results revealed that Chinese researchers paid more attention on keywords such as “vegetation index”, “crop growth”, “winter wheat”, “leaf area index (LAI)”, and “model” in the field of crop growth monitoring, and “LAI” and “unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)”, appeared increasingly in frontier research of this discipline. Overall, bibliometric results from this CiteSpace-aided study provide a quantitative visualization to enrich our understanding on the historical development, current status, and future trend of crop growth monitoring in China.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 1207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jian Zhang ◽  
Chufeng Wang ◽  
Chenghai Yang ◽  
Tianjin Xie ◽  
Zhao Jiang ◽  
...  

The spatial resolution of in situ unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) multispectral images has a crucial effect on crop growth monitoring and image acquisition efficiency. However, existing studies about optimal spatial resolution for crop monitoring are mainly based on resampled images. Therefore, the resampled spatial resolution in these studies might not be applicable to in situ UAV images. In order to obtain optimal spatial resolution of in situ UAV multispectral images for crop growth monitoring, a RedEdge Micasense 3 camera was installed onto a DJI M600 UAV flying at different heights of 22, 29, 44, 88, and 176m to capture images of seedling rapeseed with ground sampling distances (GSD) of 1.35, 1.69, 2.61, 5.73, and 11.61 cm, respectively. Meanwhile, the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) measured by a GreenSeeker (GS-NDVI) and leaf area index (LAI) were collected to evaluate the performance of nine vegetation indices (VIs) and VI*plant height (PH) at different GSDs for rapeseed growth monitoring. The results showed that the normalized difference red edge index (NDRE) had a better performance for estimating GS-NDVI (R2 = 0.812) and LAI (R2 = 0.717), compared with other VIs. Moreover, when GSD was less than 2.61 cm, the NDRE*PH derived from in situ UAV images outperformed the NDRE for LAI estimation (R2 = 0.757). At oversized GSD (≥5.73 cm), imprecise PH information and a large heterogeneity within the pixel (revealed by semi-variogram analysis) resulted in a large random error for LAI estimation by NDRE*PH. Furthermore, the image collection and processing time at 1.35 cm GSD was about three times as long as that at 2.61 cm. The result of this study suggested that NDRE*PH from UAV multispectral images with a spatial resolution around 2.61 cm could be a preferential selection for seedling rapeseed growth monitoring, while NDRE alone might have a better performance for low spatial resolution images.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haikuan Feng ◽  
Huilin Tao ◽  
Chunjiang Zhao ◽  
Zhenhai Li ◽  
Guijun Yang

Abstract Background: Although crop-growth monitoring is important for agricultural managers, it has always been a difficult research topic. However, unnamed aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with RGB and hyperspectral cameras can now acquire high-resolution remote-sensing images, which facilitates and accelerates such monitoring. Results: To explore the effect of monitoring a single crop-growth indicator and multiple indicators, this study combines six growth indicators (plant nitrogen content, above-ground biomass, plant water content, chlorophyll, leaf area index, and plant height) into a new comprehensive growth index (CGI). We investigate the performance of RGB imagery and hyperspectral data for monitoring crop growth based on multi-time estimation of the CGI. The CGI is estimated from the vegetation indices based on UAV hyperspectral data treated by linear, nonlinear, and multiple linear regression (MLR), partial least squares (PLSR), and random forest (RF). The results show that (1) the RGB-imagery indices red reflectance (r), the excess-red index(EXR), the vegetation atmospherically resistant index(VARI), and the modified green-red vegetation index(MGRVI) , as well as the spectral indices consisting of the linear combination index (LCI), the modified simple ratio index(MSR), the simple ratio vegetation index(SR), and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)are more strongly correlated with the CGI than a single growth-monitoring indicator (2) The CGI estimation model is constructed by comparing a single RGB-imagery index and a spectral index, and the optimal RGB-imagery index corresponding to each of the four growth stage in order is r, r, r, EXR; the optimal spectral index is LCI for all four growth stages. (3) The MLR, PLSR, and RF methods are used to estimate the CGI. The MLR method produces the best estimates. (4) Finally, the CGI is more accurately estimated using the UAV hyperspectral indices than using the RGB-image indices.Conclusions: UAVs carrying RGB cameras and hyperspectral cameras have high inversion CGI accuracy and can judge the overall growth of wheat can provide a reference for monitoring the growth of wheat.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Narayanarao Bhogapurapu ◽  
Subhadip Dey ◽  
Avik Bhattacharya ◽  
Dipankar Mandal ◽  
Juan M Lopez Sanchez ◽  
...  

Accurate and high-resolution spatio-temporal information about crop phenology obtained from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data is an essential component for crop management and yield estimation at a local scale. Crop growth monitoring studies seldom exploit complete polarimetric information contained in dual-pol GRD SAR data. In this study, we propose three polarimetric descriptors: the pseudo scattering-type parameter (θc), the pseudo scattering entropy parameter (Hc), and the co-pol purity parameter (mc) from dual-pol S1 GRD SAR data. We also introduce a novel unsupervised clustering framework using Hc and θc with six clustering zones to represent various scattering mechanisms. We implemented the proposed algorithm on the cloud-based Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform for Sentinel-1 SAR data. We have shown the sensitivity of these descriptors over a time series of data for wheat and canola crops at a test site in Canada. From the leaf development stage to the flowering stage for both crops, the pseudo scattering-type parameter θc changes by approximately 17°. Moreover, within the entire phenology window, both mc and Hc varies by about 0.6. The effectiveness of θc and Hc to cluster the phenological stages for the two crops is also evident from the clustering plot. During the leaf development stage, about 90 % of the sampling points were clustered into the low to medium entropy scattering zone for both the crops. Throughout the flowering stage, the entire cluster shifted into the high entropy vegetation scattering zone. Finally, during the ripening stage, the clusters of sample points were split between the high entropy vegetation scattering zone and the high entropy distributed scattering zone, with > 55 % of the sampling points in the high entropy distributed scattering zone. This innovative clustering framework will facilitate<br>the operational use of S1 GRD SAR data for agricultural applications.<div><b><br></b></div><div>This article is submitted to ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing<br><br></div>


Author(s):  
Narayanarao Bhogapurapu ◽  
Subhadip Dey ◽  
Dipankar Mandal ◽  
Avik Bhattacharya ◽  
Y. S. Rao

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (10) ◽  
pp. 2894
Author(s):  
Huaimin Li ◽  
Weipan Lin ◽  
Fangrong Pang ◽  
Xiaoping Jiang ◽  
Weixing Cao ◽  
...  

An instrument developed to monitor and diagnose crop growth can quickly and non-destructively obtain crop growth information, which is helpful for crop field production and management. Focusing on the problems with existing two-band instruments used for crop growth monitoring and diagnosis, such as insufficient information available on crop growth and low accuracy of some growth indices retrieval, our research team developed a portable three-band instrument for crop-growth monitoring and diagnosis (CGMD) that obtains a larger amount of information. Based on CGMD, this paper carried out studies on monitoring wheat growth indices. According to the acquired three-band reflectance spectra, the combined indices were constructed by combining different bands, two-band vegetation indices (NDVI, RVI, and DVI), and three-band vegetation indices (TVI-1 and TVI-2). The fitting results of the vegetation indices obtained by CGMD and the commercial instrument FieldSpec HandHeld2 was high and the new instrument could be used for monitoring the canopy vegetation indices. By fitting each vegetation index to the growth index, the results showed that the optimal vegetation indices corresponding to leaf area index (LAI), leaf dry weight (LDW), leaf nitrogen content (LNC), and leaf nitrogen accumulation (LNA) were TVI-2, TVI-1, NDVI (R730, R815), and NDVI (R730, R815), respectively. R2 values corresponding to LAI, LDW, LNC and LNA were 0.64, 0.84, 0.60, and 0.82, respectively, and their relative root mean square error (RRMSE) values were 0.29, 0.26, 0.17, and 0.30, respectively. The addition of the red spectral band to CGMD effectively improved the monitoring results of wheat LAI and LDW. Focusing the problem of vegetation index saturation, this paper proposed a method to construct the wheat-growth-index spectral monitoring models that were defined according to the growth periods. It improved the prediction accuracy of LAI, LDW, and LNA, with R2 values of 0.79, 0.85, and 0.85, respectively, and the RRMSE values of these growth indices were 0.22, 0.23, and 0.28, respectively. The method proposed here could be used for the guidance of wheat field cultivation.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Narayanarao Bhogapurapu ◽  
Subhadip Dey ◽  
Avik Bhattacharya ◽  
Dipankar Mandal ◽  
Juan M Lopez Sanchez ◽  
...  

Accurate and high-resolution spatio-temporal information about crop phenology obtained from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data is an essential component for crop management and yield estimation at a local scale. Crop growth monitoring studies seldom exploit complete polarimetric information contained in dual-pol GRD SAR data. In this study, we propose three polarimetric descriptors: the pseudo scattering-type parameter (θc), the pseudo scattering entropy parameter (Hc), and the co-pol purity parameter (mc) from dual-pol S1 GRD SAR data. We also introduce a novel unsupervised clustering framework using Hc and θc with six clustering zones to represent various scattering mechanisms. We implemented the proposed algorithm on the cloud-based Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform for Sentinel-1 SAR data. We have shown the sensitivity of these descriptors over a time series of data for wheat and canola crops at a test site in Canada. From the leaf development stage to the flowering stage for both crops, the pseudo scattering-type parameter θc changes by approximately 17°. Moreover, within the entire phenology window, both mc and Hc varies by about 0.6. The effectiveness of θc and Hc to cluster the phenological stages for the two crops is also evident from the clustering plot. During the leaf development stage, about 90 % of the sampling points were clustered into the low to medium entropy scattering zone for both the crops. Throughout the flowering stage, the entire cluster shifted into the high entropy vegetation scattering zone. Finally, during the ripening stage, the clusters of sample points were split between the high entropy vegetation scattering zone and the high entropy distributed scattering zone, with > 55 % of the sampling points in the high entropy distributed scattering zone. This innovative clustering framework will facilitate<br>the operational use of S1 GRD SAR data for agricultural applications.<div><b><br></b></div><div>This article is submitted to ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing<br><br></div>


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (16) ◽  
pp. 2564
Author(s):  
Yeshanbele Alebele ◽  
Xue Zhang ◽  
Wenhui Wang ◽  
Gaoxiang Yang ◽  
Xia Yao ◽  
...  

Crop biomass is a critical variable to make sound decisions about field crop monitoring activities (fertilizers and irrigation) and crop productivity forecasts. More importantly, crop biomass estimations by components are essential for crop growth monitoring as the yield formation of crops results from the accumulation and transportation of substances between different organs. Retrieval of crop biomass from synthetic aperture radar SAR or optical imagery is of paramount importance for in-season monitoring of crop growth. A combination of optical and SAR imagery can compensate for their limitations and has exhibited comparative advantages in biomass estimation. Notably, the joint estimations of biophysical parameters might be more accurate than that of an individual parameter. Previous studies have attempted to use satellite imagery to estimate aboveground biomass, but the estimation of biomass for individual organs remains a challenge. Multi-target Gaussian process regressor stacking (MGPRS), as a new machine learning method, can be suitably utilized to estimate biomass components jointly from satellite imagery data, as the model does not require a large amount of data for training and can be adjusted to the required degrees of relationship exhibited by the given data. Thus, the aim of this study was to estimate the biomass of individual organs by using MGPRS in conjunction with optical (Sentinel-2A) and SAR (Sentinel-1A) imagery. Two hybrid indices, SAR and optical multiplication vegetation index (SOMVI) and SAR and optical difference vegetation index (SODVI), have been constructed to examine their estimation performance. The hybrid vegetation indices were used as input for the MGPRS and single-target Gaussian process regression (SGPR). The accuracy of the estimation methods was analyzed by in situ measurements of aboveground biomass (AGB) and organ biomass conducted in 2018 and 2019 over the paddy rice fields of Xinghua in Jiangsu Province, China. The results showed that the combined indices (SOMVI and SODVI) performed better than those derived from either the optical or SAR data only. The best predictive accuracy was achieved by the MGPRS using SODVI as input (r2 = 0.84, RMSE = 0.4 kg/m2 for stem biomass; r2 = 0.87, RMSE = 0.16 kg/m2 for AGB). This was higher than using SOMVI as input for the MGPRS (r2 = 0.71, RMSE = 1.12 kg/m2 for stem biomass; r2 = 0.71, RMSE = 0.56 kg/m2 for AGB) or SGPR (r2 = 0.63, RMSE = 1.08 kg/m2 for stem biomass; r2 = 0.67, RMSE = 1.08 kg/m2 for AGB). Relatively, higher accuracy for leaf biomass was achieved using SOMVI (r2 = 0.83) than using SODVI (r2 = 0.73) as input for MGPRS. Our results demonstrate that the combined indices are effective by integrating SAR and optical imagery and MGPRS outperformed SGPR with the same input variable for estimating rice crop biomass. The presented workflow will improve the estimation of crops biomass components from satellite data for effective crop growth monitoring.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhaopeng Fu ◽  
Jie Jiang ◽  
Yang Gao ◽  
Brian Krienke ◽  
Meng Wang ◽  
...  

Leaf area index (LAI) and leaf dry matter (LDM) are important indices of crop growth. Real-time, nondestructive monitoring of crop growth is instructive for the diagnosis of crop growth and prediction of grain yield. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based remote sensing is widely used in precision agriculture due to its unique advantages in flexibility and resolution. This study was carried out on wheat trials treated with different nitrogen levels and seeding densities in three regions of Jiangsu Province in 2018–2019. Canopy spectral images were collected by the UAV equipped with a multi-spectral camera during key wheat growth stages. To verify the results of the UAV images, the LAI, LDM, and yield data were obtained by destructive sampling. We extracted the wheat canopy reflectance and selected the best vegetation index for monitoring growth and predicting yield. Simple linear regression (LR), multiple linear regression (MLR), stepwise multiple linear regression (SMLR), partial least squares regression (PLSR), artificial neural network (ANN), and random forest (RF) modeling methods were used to construct a model for wheat yield estimation. The results show that the multi-spectral camera mounted on the multi-rotor UAV has a broad application prospect in crop growth index monitoring and yield estimation. The vegetation index combined with the red edge band and the near-infrared band was significantly correlated with LAI and LDM. Machine learning methods (i.e., PLSR, ANN, and RF) performed better for predicting wheat yield. The RF model constructed by normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) at the jointing stage, heading stage, flowering stage, and filling stage was the optimal wheat yield estimation model in this study, with an R2 of 0.78 and relative root mean square error (RRMSE) of 0.1030. The results provide a theoretical basis for monitoring crop growth with a multi-rotor UAV platform and explore a technical method for improving the precision of yield estimation.


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