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Functional Plant Biology Functional Plant Biology Society
Plant function and evolutionary biology
RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

Coupling of machine learning methods to improve estimation of ground coverage from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery for high-throughput phenotyping of crops

Pengcheng Hu https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7958-1407 A , Scott C. Chapman A B and Bangyou Zheng https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1551-0970 A C
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A CSIRO Agriculture and Food, Queensland Biosciences Precinct 306 Carmody Road, St Lucia 4067, Qld, Australia.

B School of Food and Agricultural Sciences, The University of Queensland, via Warrego Highway, Gatton 4343, Qld, Australia.

C Corresponding author. Email: bangyou.zheng@csiro.au

Functional Plant Biology 48(8) 766-779 https://doi.org/10.1071/FP20309
Submitted: 2 October 2020  Accepted: 14 February 2021   Published: 5 March 2021

Journal Compilation © CSIRO 2021 Open Access CC BY

Abstract

Ground coverage (GC) allows monitoring of crop growth and development and is normally estimated as the ratio of vegetation to the total pixels from nadir images captured by visible-spectrum (RGB) cameras. The accuracy of estimated GC can be significantly impacted by the effect of ‘mixed pixels’, which is related to the spatial resolution of the imagery as determined by flight altitude, camera resolution and crop characteristics (fine vs coarse textures). In this study, a two-step machine learning method was developed to improve the accuracy of GC of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) estimated from coarse-resolution RGB images captured by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) at higher altitudes. The classification tree-based per-pixel segmentation (PPS) method was first used to segment fine-resolution reference images into vegetation and background pixels. The reference and their segmented images were degraded to the target coarse spatial resolution. These degraded images were then used to generate a training dataset for a regression tree-based model to establish the sub-pixel classification (SPC) method. The newly proposed method (i.e. PPS-SPC) was evaluated with six synthetic and four real UAV image sets (SISs and RISs, respectively) with different spatial resolutions. Overall, the results demonstrated that the PPS-SPC method obtained higher accuracy of GC in both SISs and RISs comparing to PPS method, with root mean squared errors (RMSE) of less than 6% and relative RMSE (RRMSE) of less than 11% for SISs, and RMSE of less than 5% and RRMSE of less than 35% for RISs. The proposed PPS-SPC method can be potentially applied in plant breeding and precision agriculture to balance accuracy requirement and UAV flight height in the limited battery life and operation time.

Keywords: ground coverage, UAV, remote sensing, high-throughput phenotyping, mixed pixels, plant breeding.


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