Detecting infestation of take-all disease in wheat using Landsat Thematic Mapper imagery

Take-all is an important root disease of wheat and has caused considerable decreases in crop yield in China. Although take-all is the most studied disease of any crop, there is little research on detecting the infestation of the disease using remote sensing imagery. In this Letter, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and Masking, Principal-Components Transformation, and Analysis techniques were used to detect the severe infestation of the take-all disease in wheat using Landsat Thematic Mapper imageries on 30 April and 16 May 2006. Results showed that the technique was simple and effective in the study areas, and could be applied to other wheat-planting regions with similar growth situations.