Title
A Fixed-Threshold Method For Estimating Fractional Vegetation Cover Of Maize Under Different Levels Of Water Stress
Abstract
Accurate estimation of fractional vegetation cover (FVC) from digital images taken by commercially available cameras is of great significance in order to monitor the vegetation growth status, especially when plants are under water stress. Two classic threshold-based methods, namely, the intersection method (T-1 method) and the equal misclassification probability method (T-2 method), have been widely applied to Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images. However, the high coverage and severe water stress of crops in the field make it difficult to extract FVC stably and accurately. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a fixed-threshold method based on the statistical analysis of thresholds obtained from the two classic threshold approaches. Firstly, a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), including the distributions of green vegetation and backgrounds, was fitted on four color features: excessive green index, H channel of the Hue-Saturation-Value (HSV) color space, a* channel of the CIE L*a*b* color space, and the brightness-enhanced a* channel (denoted as a*_I). Secondly, thresholds were calculated by applying the T-1 and T-2 methods to the GMM of each color feature. Thirdly, based on the statistical analysis of the thresholds with better performance between T-1 and T-2, the fixed-threshold method was proposed. Finally, the fixed-threshold method was applied to the optimal color feature a*_I to estimate FVC, and was compared with the two classic approaches. Results showed that, for some images with high reference FVC, FVC was seriously underestimated by 0.128 and 0.141 when using the T-1 and T-2 methods, respectively, but this problem was eliminated by the proposed fixed-threshold method. Compared with the T-1 and T-2 methods, for images taken in plots under severe water stress, the mean absolute error of FVC obtained by the fixed-threshold method was decreased by 0.043 and 0.193, respectively. Overall, the FVC estimation using the proposed fixed-threshold method has the advantages of robustness, accuracy, and high efficiency, with a coefficient of determination (R-2) of 0.99 and root mean squared error (RMSE) of 0.02.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.3390/rs13051009
REMOTE SENSING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
proximal RGB image, color feature, Gaussian mixture model, expectation-maximization algorithm
Journal
13
Issue
Citations 
PageRank 
5
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yaxiao Niu100.34
Huihui Zhang200.68
Wenting Han301.01
Liyuan Zhang400.34
Haipeng Chen500.68