SPSI: A Novel Composite Index for Estimating Panicle Number in Winter Wheat before Heading from UAV Multispectral Imagery

Rapid and accurate estimation of panicle number per unit ground area (PNPA) in winter wheat before heading is crucial to evaluate yield potential and regulate crop growth for increasing the final yield. The accuracies of existing methods were low for estimating PNPA with remotely sensed data acquired before heading since the spectral saturation and background effects were ignored. This study proposed a spectral-textural PNPA sensitive index (SPSI) from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) multispectral imagery for reducing the spectral saturation and improving PNPA estimation in winter wheat before heading. The effect of background materials on PNPA estimated by textural indices (TIs) was examined, and the composite index SPSI was constructed by integrating the optimal spectral index (SI) and TI. Subsequently, the performance of SPSI was evaluated in comparison with other indices (SI and TIs). The results demonstrated that green-pixel TIs yielded better performances than all-pixel TIs apart from TI([HOM]), TI([ENT]), and TI([SEM]) among all indices from 8 types of textural features. SPSI, which was calculated by the formula DATT([850,730,675]) + NDTI(COR[850,730]), exhibited the highest overall accuracies for any date in any dataset in comparison with DATT([850,730,675]), TI(NDRE[MEA]), and NDTI(COR[850,730]). For the unified models assembling 2 experimental datasets, the R(V)(2) values of SPSI increased by 0.11 to 0.23, and both RMSE and RRMSE decreased by 16.43% to 38.79% as compared to the suboptimal index on each date. These findings indicated that the SPSI is valuable in reducing the spectral saturation and has great potential to better estimate PNPA using high-resolution satellite imagery.