Regional Monitoring of Leaf ChlorophyII Content of Summer Maize by Integrating Multi-Source Remote Sensing Data

Abstract

This study addresses the problem of restricted ability for large-scale monitoring due to the limited cruising time of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) by identifying an optimal leaf ChlorophyII content (LCC) inversion machine learning model at different scales and under different parameterization schemes based on simultaneous observations of ground sampling, UAV flight, and satellite imagery. The following results emerged: (1) The correlation coefficient between most remote sensing features (RSFs) and LCC increased as the remote scale expanded; thus, the scale error caused by the random position difference between GPS and measuring equipment should be considered in field sampling observations. (2) The LCC simulation accuracy of the UAV multi-spectral camera using four machine learning algorithms was ExtraTree > GradientBoost > AdaBoost > RandomForest, and the 20- and 30-pixel scales had better accuracy than the 10-pixel scale, while the accuracy for three feature combination schemes ranked combination of extremely significantly correlated RSFs > combination of significantly correlated and above RSFs > combination of all features. ExtraTree was confirmed as the optimal model with the feature combination of scheme 2 at the 20-pixel scale. (3) Of the Sentinel-2 RSFs, 27 of 28 were extremely significantly correlated with LCC, while original band reflectance was negatively correlated, and VIs were positively correlated. (4) The LCC simulation accuracy of the four machine learning algorithms ranked as ExtraTree > GradientBoost > RandomForest > AdaBoost. In a comparison of two parameterization schemes, scheme 1 had better accuracy, while ExtraTree was the best algorithm, with 11 band reflectance as input RSFs; the RMSE values for the training and testing data sets of 0.7213 and 1.7198, respectively.