Vegetable Crop Biomass Estimation Using Hyperspectral and RGB 3D UAV Data

Remote sensing (RS) has been an effective tool to monitor agricultural production systems, but for vegetable crops, precision agriculture has received less interest to date. The objective of this study was to test the predictive performance of two types of RS data-crop height information derived from point clouds based on RGB UAV data, and reflectance information from terrestrial hyperspectral imagery-to predict fresh matter yield (FMY) for three vegetable crops (eggplant, tomato, and cabbage). The study was conducted in an experimental layout in Bengaluru, India, at five dates in summer 2017. The prediction accuracy varied strongly depending on the RS dataset used. For all crops, a good predictive performance with cross-validated prediction error < 10% was achieved. The growth stage of the crops had no significant effect on the prediction accuracy, although increasing trends of an underestimation of FMY with later sampling dates for eggplant and tomato were found. The study proves that an estimation of vegetable FMY using RS data is successful throughout the growing season. Different RS datasets were best for biomass prediction of the three vegetables, indicating that multi-sensory data collection should be preferred to single sensor use, as no one sensor system is superior.