Machine learning methods for soil moisture prediction in vineyards using digital images

In this paper, we propose to estimate the moisture of vineyard soils from digital photography using machine learning methods. Two nonlinear regression models are implemented: a multilayer perceptron (MEP) and a support vector regression (SVR). Pixels coded with RGB colour model extracted from soil digital images along with the associated known soil moisture levels are used to train both models in order to predict moisture content from newly acquired images. The study is conducted on samples of six soil types collected from Chateau Kefraya terroirs in Lebanon. Both methods succeeded in forecasting moisture giving high correlation values between the measured moisture and the predicted moisture when tested on unknown data. However, the method based on SVR outperformed the one based on MLP yielding Pearson correlation coefficient values ranging from 0.89 to 0.99. Moreover, it is a simple and noninvasive method that can be adopted easily to detect vineyards soil moisture.