Sugarcane Nitrogen Concentration and Irrigation Level Prediction Based on UAV Multispectral Imagery

Sugarcane is the main industrial crop for sugar production, and its growth status is closely related to fertilizer, water, and light input. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based multispectral imagery is widely used for high-throughput phenotyping, since it can rapidly predict crop vigor at field scale. This study focused on the potential of drone multispectral images in predicting canopy nitrogen concentration (CNC) and irrigation levels for sugarcane. An experiment was carried out in a sugarcane field with three irrigation levels and five fertilizer levels. Multispectral images at an altitude of 40 m were acquired during the elongating stage. Partial least square (PLS), backpropagation neural network (BPNN), and extreme learning machine (ELM) were adopted to establish CNC prediction models based on various combinations of band reflectance and vegetation indices. The simple ratio pigment index (SRPI), normalized pigment chlorophyll index (NPCI), and normalized green-blue difference index (NGBDI) were selected as model inputs due to their higher grey relational degree with the CNC and lower correlation between one another. The PLS model based on the five-band reflectance and the three vegetation indices achieved the best accuracy (<i>R</i>_v = 0.79, <i>RMSE</i>_v = 0.11). Support vector machine (SVM) and BPNN were then used to classify the irrigation levels based on five spectral features which had high correlations with irrigation levels. SVM reached a higher accuracy of 80.6%. The results of this study demonstrated that high resolution multispectral images could provide effective information for CNC prediction and water irrigation level recognition for sugarcane crop.