Cotton Yield Estimation Using the Remotely Sensed Cotton Boll Index from UAV Images

Cotton constitutes 81% of the world’s natural fibers. Accurate and rapid cotton yield estimation is important for cotton trade and agricultural policy development. Therefore, we developed a remote sensing index that can intuitively represent cotton boll characteristics and support cotton yield estim...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Drones (Basel) 2022-09, Vol.6 (9), p.254
Main Authors: Shi, Guanwei, Du, Xin, Du, Mingwei, Li, Qiangzi, Tian, Xiaoli, Ren, Yiting, Zhang, Yuan, Wang, Hongyan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aerial surveys
Agricultural production
Climate change
Correlation coefficients
Cotton
cotton boll index
Cotton growing
Cotton industry
Crop yields
Density
Digital cameras
Drone aircraft
Environmental aspects
Growth models
Image processing
Image segmentation
Methods
Near infrared radiation
Pixels
Regression analysis
Remote sensing
Remote sensing systems
Satellites
Support vector machines
threshold segmentation
Time series
UAV
Unmanned aerial vehicles
Vegetation
yield estimation
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Summary:Cotton constitutes 81% of the world’s natural fibers. Accurate and rapid cotton yield estimation is important for cotton trade and agricultural policy development. Therefore, we developed a remote sensing index that can intuitively represent cotton boll characteristics and support cotton yield estimation by extracting cotton boll pixels. In our study, the Density of open Cotton boll Pixels (DCPs) was extracted by designing different cotton boll indices combined with the threshold segmentation method. The relationship between DCP and field survey datasets, the Density of Total Cotton bolls (DTC), and yield were compared and analyzed. Five common yield estimation models, Linear Regression (LR), Support Vector Regression (SVR), Classification and Regression Trees (CART), Random Forest (RF), and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), were implemented and evaluated. The results showed that DCP had a strong correlation with yield, with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.84. The RF method exhibited the best yield estimation performance, with average R2 and rRMSE values of 0.77 and 7.5%, respectively (five-fold cross-validation). This study showed that RedGreenBlue (RGB) and Near Infrared Red (NIR) normalized, a normalized form index consisting of the RGB and NIR bands, performed best.
ISSN:2504-446X
2504-446X
DOI:10.3390/drones6090254