Modeling of Environmental Impacts on Aerial Hyperspectral Images for Corn Plant Phenotyping

Aerial imaging technologies have been widely applied in agricultural plant remote sensing. However, an as yet unexplored challenge with field imaging is that the environmental conditions, such as sun angle, cloud coverage, temperature, and so on, can significantly alter plant appearance and thus affect the imaging sensor's accuracy toward extracting plant feature measurements. These image alterations result from the complicated interaction between the real-time environments and plants. Analysis of these impacts requires continuous monitoring of the changes through various environmental conditions, which has been difficult with current aerial remote sensing systems. This paper aimed to propose a modeling method to comprehensively understand and model the environmental influences on hyperspectral imaging data. In 2019, a fixed hyperspectral imaging gantry was constructed in Purdue University's research farm, and over 8000 repetitive images of the same corn field were taken with a 2.5 min interval for 31 days. Time-tagged local environment data, including solar zenith angle, solar irradiation, temperature, wind speed, and so on, were also recorded during the imaging time. The images were processed for phenotyping data, and the time series decomposition method was applied to extract the phenotyping data variation caused by the changing environments. An artificial neural network (ANN) was then built to model the relationship between the phenotyping data variation and environmental changes. The ANN model was able to accurately predict the environmental effects in remote sensing results, and thus could be used to effectively eliminate the environment-induced variation in the phenotyping features. The test of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) calculated from the hyperspectral images showed that variance in NDVI was reduced by 79%. A similar performance was confirmed with the relative water content (RWC) predictions. Therefore, this modeling method shows great potential for application in aerial remote sensing applications in agriculture, to significantly improve the imaging quality by effectively eliminating the effects from the changing environmental conditions.