Comparison of new hyperspectral index and machine learning models for prediction of winter wheat leaf water content

BACKGROUND: The leaf water content estimation model is established by hyperspectral technology, which is crucial and provides technical reference for precision irrigation. METHODS: In this study, two consecutive years of field experiments (different irrigation times and seven wheat varieties) in 2018–2020 were performed to obtain the canopy spectra reflectance and leaf water content (LWC) data. The characteristic bands related to LWC were extracted from correlation coefficient method (CA) and x-Loading weight method (x-Lw). Five modeling methods, spectral index and four other methods (Partial Least-Squares Regression (PLSR), Random Forest Regression (RFR), Extreme Random Trees (ERT), and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN)) based characteristic bands, were employed to construct LWC estimation models. RESULTS: The results showed that the canopy spectral reflectance increased with the increase of irrigation times, especially in the near-infrared band (750–1350 nm). The prediction accuracy of the newly developed differential spectral index DVI (R1185, R1307) was higher than that of the existing spectral index, with R(2) of 0.85 and R(2) of 0.78 for the calibration and validation, respectively. Due to a large amount of hyperspectral data, the correlation coefficient method (CA) and x-Loading weight (x-Lw) were used to select the water characteristic bands (100 and 28 characteristic bands, respectively) from the full spectrum. We found that the accuracy of the model based on the characteristic bands was not significantly lower than that of the full spectrum-based models. Among these models, the ERT- x-Lw model performed the best (R(2) and RMSE of 0.88 and 1.46; 0.84 and 1.62 for the calibration and validation, respectively). In addition, the accuracy of the LWC estimation model constructed by ERT-x-Lw was higher than that of DVI (R1185, R1307). CONCLUSION: The two models based on ERT-x-Lw and DVI (R1185, R1307) can effectively predict wheat leaf water content. The results provide a technical reference and a basis for crop water monitoring and diagnosis under similar production conditions.