Application of soft computing methods and spectral reflectance data for wheat growth monitoring

Abstract

Technology of precision agriculture has caused to the remote sensors development that compute Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) parameters. Vegetation indices obtained from remote sensing data can help to summarize climate conditions. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), as a soft computing methods, are one of the most efficient methods for computing as compared to the statistical and analytical techniques for spectral data. This study was employed experimental radial basis function (RBF) of ANN models and adaptive neural-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) to design the network in order to predict the soil plant analysis development (SPAD), protein content and grain yield of wheat plant based on spectral reflectance value and to compare two models. Results indicated that the obtained results of RBF method with high average correlation coefficient (0.984, 0.981 and 0.9807 in 2015 for SPAD, yield and protein, respectively and 0.979, 0.9805 and 0.984 in 2016) and low RMSE (0.271, 103.315 and 0.111 in 2015 for SPAD, yield and protein, respectively and 0.407, 105.482 and 0.121 in 2016) has the high accuracy and high performance compared to ANFIS models.