scholarly journals A Robust Vegetation Index Based on Different UAV RGB Images to Estimate SPAD Values of Naked Barley Leaves

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 686
Author(s):  
Yu Liu ◽  
Kenji Hatou ◽  
Takanori Aihara ◽  
Sakuya Kurose ◽  
Tsutomu Akiyama ◽  
...  

Chlorophyll content in plant leaves is an essential indicator of the growth condition and the fertilization management effect of naked barley crops. The soil plant analysis development (SPAD) values strongly correlate with leaf chlorophyll contents. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) can provide an efficient way to retrieve SPAD values on a relatively large scale with a high temporal resolution. But the UAV mounted with high-cost multispectral or hyperspectral sensors may be a tremendous economic burden for smallholder farmers. To overcome this shortcoming, we investigated the potential of UAV mounted with a commercial digital camera for estimating the SPAD values of naked barley leaves. We related 21 color-based vegetation indices (VIs) calculated from UAV images acquired from two flight heights (6.0 m and 50.0 m above ground level) in four different growth stages with SPAD values. Our results indicated that vegetation extraction and naked barley ears mask could improve the correlation between image-calculated vegetation indices and SPAD values. The VIs of ‘L*,’ ‘b*,’ ‘G − B’ and ‘2G − R − B’ showed significant correlations with SPAD values of naked barley leaves at both flight heights. The validation of the regression model showed that the index of ‘G-B’ could be regarded as the most robust vegetation index for predicting the SPAD values of naked barley leaves for different images and different flight heights. Our study demonstrated that the UAV mounted with a commercial camera has great potentiality in retrieving SPAD values of naked barley leaves under unstable photography conditions. It is significant for farmers to take advantage of the cheap measurement system to monitor crops.

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 1133-1146
Author(s):  
Beichen Lyu ◽  
Stuart D. Smith ◽  
Yexiang Xue ◽  
Katy M. Rainey ◽  
Keith Cherkauer

HighlightsThis study addresses two computational challenges in high-throughput phenotyping: scalability and efficiency.Specifically, we focus on extracting crop images and deriving vegetation indices using unmanned aerial systems.To this end, we outline a data processing pipeline, featuring a crop localization algorithm and trie data structure.We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by computing large-scale and high-precision vegetation indices in a soybean breeding experiment, where we evaluate soybean growth under water inundation and temporal change.Abstract. In agronomy, high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) can provide key information for agronomists in genomic selection as well as farmers in yield prediction. Recently, HTP using unmanned aerial systems (UAS) has shown advantages in both cost and efficiency. However, scalability and efficiency have not been well studied when processing images in complex contexts, such as using multispectral cameras, and when images are collected during early and late growth stages. These challenges hamper further analysis to quantify phenotypic traits for large-scale and high-precision applications in plant breeding. To solve these challenges, our research team previously built a three-step data processing pipeline, which is highly modular. For this project, we present improvements to the previous pipeline to improve canopy segmentation and crop plot localization, leading to improved accuracy in crop image extraction. Furthermore, we propose a novel workflow based on a trie data structure to compute vegetation indices efficiently and with greater flexibility. For each of our proposed changes, we evaluate the advantages by comparison with previous models in the literature or by comparing processing results using both the original and improved pipelines. The improved pipeline is implemented as two MATLAB programs: Crop Image Extraction version 2 (CIE 2.0) and Vegetation Index Derivation version 1 (VID 1.0). Using CIE 2.0 and VID 1.0, we compute canopy coverage and normalized difference vegetation indices (NDVIs) for a soybean phenotyping experiment. We use canopy coverage to investigate excess water stress and NDVIs to evaluate temporal patterns across the soybean growth stages. Both experimental results compare favorably with previous studies, especially for approximation of soybean reproductive stage. Overall, the proposed methodology and implemented experiments provide a scalable and efficient paradigm for applying HTP with UAS to general plant breeding. Keywords: Data processing pipeline, High-throughput phenotyping, Image processing, Soybean breeding, Unmanned aerial systems, Vegetation indices.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1144
Author(s):  
Mahendra Bhandari ◽  
Shannon Baker ◽  
Jackie C. Rudd ◽  
Amir M. H. Ibrahim ◽  
Anjin Chang ◽  
...  

Drought significantly limits wheat productivity across the temporal and spatial domains. Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) has become an indispensable tool to collect refined spatial and high temporal resolution imagery data. A 2-year field study was conducted in 2018 and 2019 to determine the temporal effects of drought on canopy growth of winter wheat. Weekly UAS data were collected using red, green, and blue (RGB) and multispectral (MS) sensors over a yield trial consisting of 22 winter wheat cultivars in both irrigated and dryland environments. Raw-images were processed to compute canopy features such as canopy cover (CC) and canopy height (CH), and vegetation indices (VIs) such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Excess Green Index (ExG), and Normalized Difference Red-edge Index (NDRE). The drought was more severe in 2018 than in 2019 and the effects of growth differences across years and irrigation levels were visible in the UAS measurements. CC, CH, and VIs, measured during grain filling, were positively correlated with grain yield (r = 0.4–0.7, p < 0.05) in the dryland in both years. Yield was positively correlated with VIs in 2018 (r = 0.45–0.55, p < 0.05) in the irrigated environment, but the correlations were non-significant in 2019 (r = 0.1 to −0.4), except for CH. The study shows that high-throughput UAS data can be used to monitor the drought effects on wheat growth and productivity across the temporal and spatial domains.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Tengku Adhwa Syaherah Tengku Mohd Suhairi ◽  
Siti Sarah Mohd Sinin ◽  
Eranga M. Wimalasiri ◽  
Nur Marahaini Mohd Nizar ◽  
Anil Shekar Tharmandran ◽  
...  

In this experiment, proximal measurements and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery was used to determine growth stages for bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea (L.) Verdc.). The crop is a high potential crop due to its ability to yield in marginal environments, but neglected and underutilised due to lack of information on its growth in different environments. This study evaluated the correlation between Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) derived from the ground as well as airborne sensors to test the ability of remotely sensed data to identify growth stages. NDVI and chlorophyll content of bambara groundnut leaves were measured at ground level at 18, 32, 46 and 88 days after planting (DAP) comprising vegetative, flowering, pod formation and maturity growth stages. The UAV imagery for the experimental plots was acquired with 0.2m resolution at maturity. The result showed a significant (p &lt; 0.05) linear relationship between proximal NDVI and chlorophylls content at all growth stages ofgrowth. The R2 varied from 0.57 in the vegetative stage to 0.78 in the flowering stage. Furthermore, NDVI derived from proximal measurements and UAV data showed a significant (p &lt; 0.05) correlation. The observed high correlation between proximal sensors, UAV data and crop parameters suggest that remote sensing technologies can be used for rapid phenotyping to hasten the development of models to assess the performance of underutilised crops for food and nutrition security.


2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 273
Author(s):  
Mengyao Li ◽  
Rui Zhang ◽  
Hongxia Luo ◽  
Songwei Gu ◽  
Zili Qin

In recent years, the scale of rural land transfer has gradually expanded, and the phenomenon of non-grain-oriented cultivated land has emerged. Obtaining crop planting information is of the utmost importance to guaranteeing national food security; however, the acquisition of the spatial distribution of crops in large-scale areas often has the disadvantages of excessive calculation and low accuracy. Therefore, the IO-Growth method, which takes the growth stage every 10 days as the index and combines the spectral features of crops to refine the effective interval of conventional wavebands for object-oriented classification, was proposed. The results were as follows: (1) the IO-Growth method obtained classification results with an overall accuracy and F1 score of 0.92, and both values increased by 6.98% compared to the method applied without growth stages; (2) the IO-Growth method reduced 288 features to only 5 features, namely Sentinel-2: Red Edge1, normalized difference vegetation index, Red, short-wave infrared2, and Aerosols, on the 261st to 270th days, which greatly improved the utilization rate of the wavebands; (3) the rise of geographic data processing platforms makes it simple to complete computations with massive data in a short time. The results showed that the IO-Growth method is suitable for large-scale vegetation mapping.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 4560
Author(s):  
Lili Luo ◽  
Qingrui Chang ◽  
Qi Wang ◽  
Yong Huang

Prompt monitoring of maize dwarf mosaic virus (MDMV) is critical for the prevention and control of disease and to ensure high crop yield and quality. Here, we first analyzed the spectral differences between MDMV-infected red leaves and healthy leaves and constructed a sensitive index (SI) for measurements. Next, based on the characteristic bands (Rλ) associated with leaf anthocyanins (Anth), we determined vegetation indices (VIs) commonly used in plant physiological and biochemical parameter inversion and established a vegetation index (VIc) by utilizing the combination of two arbitrary bands following the construction principles of NDVI, DVI, RVI, and SAVI. Furthermore, we developed classification models based on linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and support vector machine (SVM) in order to distinguish the red leaves from healthy leaves. Finally, we performed UR, MLR, PLSR, PCR, and SVM simulations on Anth based on Rλ, VIs, VIc, and Rλ + VIs + VIc and indirectly estimated the severity of MDMV infection based on the relationship between the reflection spectra and Anth. Distinct from those of the normal leaves, the spectra of red leaves showed strong reflectance characteristics at 640 nm, and SI increased with increasing Anth. Moreover, the accuracy of the two VIc-based classification models was 100%, which is significantly higher than that of the VIs and Rλ-based models. Among the Anth regression models, the accuracy of the MLR model based on Rλ + VIs + VIc was the highest (R2c = 0.85; R2v = 0.74). The developed models could accurately identify MDMV and estimate the severity of its infection, laying the theoretical foundation for large-scale remote sensing-based monitoring of this virus in the future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 2667 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xueting Wang ◽  
Sha Zhang ◽  
Lili Feng ◽  
Jiahua Zhang ◽  
Fan Deng

Crop phenology is a significant factor that affects the precision of crop area extraction by using the multi-temporal vegetation indices (VIs) approach. Considering the phenological differences of maize among the different regions, the summer maize cultivated area was estimated by using enhanced vegetation index (EVI) time series images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) over the Huanghuaihai Plain in China. By analyzing the temporal shift in summer maize calendars, linear regression equations for simulating the summer maize phenology were obtained. The simulated maize phenology was used to correct the MODIS EVI time series curve of summer maize. Combining the mean absolute distance (MAD) and p-tile algorithm, the cultivated areas of summer maize were distinguished over the Hunaghuaihai Plain. The accuracy of the extraction results in each province was above 85%. Comparing the maize area of two groups from MODIS-estimated and statistical data, the validation results showed that the R2 reached 0.81 at the city level and 0.69 at the county level. It demonstrated that the approach in this study has the ability to effectively map the summer maize area over a large scale and provides a novel idea for estimating the planting area of other crops.


Drones ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaori Otsu ◽  
Magda Pla ◽  
Andrea Duane ◽  
Adrián Cardil ◽  
Lluís Brotons

Periodical outbreaks of Thaumetopoea pityocampa feeding on pine needles may pose a threat to Mediterranean coniferous forests by causing severe tree defoliation, growth reduction, and eventually mortality. To cost–effectively monitor the temporal and spatial damages in pine–oak mixed stands using unmanned aerial systems (UASs) for multispectral imagery, we aimed at developing a simple thresholding classification tool for forest practitioners as an alternative method to complex classifiers such as Random Forest. The UAS flights were performed during winter 2017–2018 over four study areas in Catalonia, northeastern Spain. To detect defoliation and further distinguish pine species, we conducted nested histogram thresholding analyses with four UAS-derived vegetation indices (VIs) and evaluated classification accuracy. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and NDVI red edge performed the best for detecting defoliation with an overall accuracy of 95% in the total study area. For discriminating pine species, accuracy results of 93–96% were only achievable with green NDVI in the partial study area, where the Random Forest classification combined for defoliation and tree species resulted in 91–93%. Finally, we achieved to estimate the average thresholds of VIs for detecting defoliation over the total area, which may be applicable across similar Mediterranean pine stands for monitoring regional forest health on a large scale.


Polar Record ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 31 (177) ◽  
pp. 169-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
D.A. Walker ◽  
N.A. Auerbach ◽  
M.M. Shippert

AbstractThe patterns of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) on three glacial surfaces of different ages in the vicinity of Toolik Lake, Alaska, were examined. NDVI was derived from SPOT multispectral digital data, and the images were stratified according to boundaries on glacial geology and vegetation maps. Ground-level measurements of NDVI from common vegetation types were also collected, using a portable spectrometer. Late Pleistocene glacial surfaces have lower image-NDVI than older Middle Pleistocene surfaces, and the mean NDVI is correlated with approximate time since deglaciation. The trends are related to differences in NDVI associated with vegetation growing on mineral vs peaty substrates. Nonacidic mineral substrates are more common on the younger landscapes, and acidic peaty soils are more common on the older surfaces. The field-NDVIs of acidic dry, moist, and wet tundra are consistently higher than those of corresponding nonacidic tundra types. These same trends are seen when the SPOT NDVI image is stratified according to vegetation boundaries appearing on two detailed vegetation maps in the region. Above-ground biomass of moist and wet acidic tundra is significantly greater than corresponding nonacidic types. Vegetation species composition was examined along two transects on the oldest and youngest glacial surfaces. Shrub cover is the most important factor affecting the spectral signatures and biomass. Older surfaces have greater cover of shrub-rich tussock tundra and shrub-filled water tracks, and the younger surfaces have more dry, well-drained sites with low biomass and relatively barren nonsorted circles and stripes. These trends are related to paludification and modification of the terrain by geomorphic and geochemical processes. Similar patterns of spectral reflectance have been noted in association with a variety of large-scale natural disturbances in northern Alaska. However, extrapolation of these results to much broader regions of the circumpolar Arctic will require the use of sensors covering larger areas, such as the AVHRR aboard the NOAA satellites.


2005 ◽  
Vol 9 (15) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edson E. Sano ◽  
Laerte G. Ferreira ◽  
Alfredo R. Huete

Abstract The all-weather capability, signal independence to the solar illumination angle, and response to 3D vegetation structures are the highlights of active radar systems for natural vegetation mapping and monitoring. However, they may present significant soil background effects. This study addresses a comparative analysis of the performance of L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data and optical vegetation indices (VIs) for discriminating the Brazilian cerrado physiognomies. The study area was the Brasilia National Park, Brazil, one of the test sites of the Large-Scale Biosphere–Atmosphere (LBA) experiment in Amazonia. Seasonal Japanese Earth Resources Satellite-1 (JERS-1) SAR backscatter coefficients (σ°) were compared with two vegetation indices [normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and enhanced vegetation index (EVI)] over the five most dominant cerrados’ physiognomies plus gallery forest. In contrast to the VIs, σ° from dry and wet seasons did not change significantly, indicating primary response to vegetation structures. Discriminant analysis and analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed an overall higher performance of radar data. However, when both SAR and VIs are combined, the discrimination capability increased significantly, indicating that the fusion of the optical and radar backscatter observations provides overall improved classifications of the cerrado types. In addition, VIs showed good performance for monitoring the cerrado dynamics.


Agronomy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 1842
Author(s):  
Ewa Panek ◽  
Dariusz Gozdowski ◽  
Michał Stępień ◽  
Stanisław Samborski ◽  
Dominik Ruciński ◽  
...  

The aims of this study were to: (i) evaluate the relationships between vegetation indices (VIs) derived from Sentinel-2 imagery and grain yield (GY) and the number of spikes per square meter (SN) of winter wheat and triticale; (ii) determine the dates and plant growth stages when the above relationships were the strongest at individual field scale, thus allowing for accurate yield prediction. Observations of GY and SN were performed at harvest on six fields (three locations in two seasons: 2017 and 2018) in three regions of Poland, i.e., northeastern (A—Brożówka), central (B—Zdziechów) and southeastern Poland (C—Kryłów). Vegetation indices (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI), modified SAVI (mSAVI), modified SAVI 2 (mSAVI2), Infrared Percentage Vegetation Index (IPVI), Global Environmental Monitoring Index (GEMI), and Ratio Vegetation Index (RVI)) calculated for sampling points from mid-March until mid-July, covering within-field soil and topographical variability, were included in the analysis. Depending on the location, the highest correlation coefficients (of about 0.6–0.9) for most of VIs with GY and SN were obtained about 4–6 weeks before harvest (from the beginning of shooting to milk maturity). Therefore, satellite-derived VIs are useful for the prediction of within-field cereal GY as well as SN variability. Information on GY, predicted together with the results for soil nutrient availability, is the basis for the formulation of variable fertilize rates in precision agriculture. All examined VIs were similarly correlated with GY and SN via the commonly used NDVI. The increase in NDVI by 0.1 unit was related to an average increase in GY by about 2 t ha−1.


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