Junqi Xiao

Crop nutrient biochemical information (mainly including chlorophyll class and nutrient elements mainly nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) is an important basis for revealing crop growth and development patterns and their relationship with the environment. Hyperspectral technology has been rapidly developed and applied in crop nutrient biochemical information monitoring research. This paper firstly describes the theoretical basis of hyperspectral technology for monitoring crop nutrients and biochemical information. Then, the research progress of hyperspectral technology in monitoring nutrient and biochemical information of crops in different growth periods or different growth environments is outlined. Meanwhile, the shortcomings of the current technology in these research directions and the future research trends are discussed. Finally, the modeling methods for building crop nutrient biochemical information monitoring models by applying hyperspectral data are systematically outlined. And the effects of different spectral pre-processing methods, spectral effective information extraction methods and modeling algorithms on the accuracy of monitoring models are analyzed. On this basis, the challenges and prospects of hyperspectral technology in monitoring crop nutrient biochemical information are presented, aiming to provide relevant theoretical basis and technical reference for the research related to monitoring and inversion of crop physiological parameters based on hyperspectral technology.

The leaf area index (LAI) is an important growth indicator used to assess the health status and growth of citrus trees. Although LAI estimation based on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms has been widely used for field crops, mainly focusing on food crops, less research has been reported on the application to fruit trees, especially citrus trees. In addition, most studies have used single-modal data for modeling, but some studies have shown that multi-modal data can be effective in improving experimental results. This study utilizes data collected from a UAV platform, including RGB images and point cloud data, to construct single-modal regression models named VoVNet (using RGB data) and PCNet (using point cloud data), as well as a multi-modal regression model called VPNet (using both RGB data and point cloud data). The LAI of citrus trees was estimated using deep neural networks, and the results of two experimental hyperparameters (loss function and learning rate) were compared under different parameters. The results of the study showed that VoVNet had Mean Squared Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and R-Squared (R²) of 0.129, 0.028, and 0.647, respectively. In comparison, PCNet decreased by 0.051 and 0.014 to 0.078 and 0.014 for MAE and MSE, respectively, while R² increased by 0.168 to 0.815. VPNet decreased by 0% and 42.9% relative to PCNet in terms of MAE and MSE to 0.078 and 0.008, respectively, while R² increased by 5.6% to 0.861. In addition, the use of loss function L1 gave better results than L2, while a lower learning rate gave better results. It is concluded that the fusion of RGB data and point cloud data collected by the UAV platform for LAI estimation is capable of monitoring citrus trees’ growth process, which can help farmers to track the growth condition of citrus trees and improve the efficiency and quality of orchard management.

Identifying and extracting male and female parent of hybrid rice and then accurately judging the spikelet flowering of male parents is the basis of hybrid rice pollination. Currently, male parent flowering information extraction for hybrid rice is basically obtained by manual recognition. In this study, remote sensing images of parental rice fields were obtained with a multispectral camera carried by a UAV (Umanned Aerial Vehicle). Six kinds of visible light vegetation indices and four kinds of multispectral vegetation indices, together with two classification methods, pixel-based supervised classification and sample-based object-oriented classification, were applied to identify the male and female parents of hybrid rice, after which the accuracies of the methods were compared. The results showed that the visible vegetation index had a better effect in pixel-based supervised classification. The kappa coefficient of ExGR (Excess Green minus Excess Red index) classification was 0.9256 and the total accuracy was 0.9552. The extraction accuracy was higher than that of the other vegetation indices and object-oriented classification. In pixel-based supervised classification, the maximum likelihood method achieved the highest identification accuracy and shortest calculation time. Taking the remote sensing images obtained with a UAV as a data source, maximum likelihood supervised classification based on ExGR index can more effectively and quickly identify the field information of male and female parents of hybrid rice so as to provide a reference for determining optimal pollination timing for hybrid rice in large-scale seed production farms.

Effective detection of rice spikelet flowering is crucial to the determination of optimal pollination timing for hybrid rice seed production. Currently, the detection of rice spikelet flowering status relies on manual observation of farmers, which has low efficiency and large errors. This study attempts to acquire rice spikelet flowering information using a hyperspectral technique and machine learning in order to meet the needs of hybrid rice seed pollination rapidly and automatically. Hyperspectral data of rice male parents with flowering and non-flowering in two experimental sites were collected with an ASD FieldSpec^® HandHeld™2 spectrometer. Three traditional classifiers, Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Back Propagation (BP) neural network, and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), were used to build classification models for rice spikelets flowering detection. Three data processing methods, PCA feature extraction, GA feature selection, and the PCA and GA combination algorithm, were used for data dimensionality reduction. By comparing the precision and recall rate of different algorithms and data processing methods, the algorithms applicable to identify rice spikelet flowering were investigated. Results show that by evaluating different feature reduction methods and classifiers, the optimal model for rice spikelets flowering detection is the BP model with PCA feature extraction. The accuracy of the model reaches up to 96–100%. Hyperspectral technology and machine learning algorithm are capable of effective detection of rice spikelet flowering. This study provides technical reference for accurate judgment of rice flowering and helps to determine the optimal operation time for supplementary pollination of hybrid rice.