Estimating Rice Leaf Nitrogen Concentration: Influence of Regression Algorithms Based on Passive and Active Leaf Reflectance

Nitrogen (N) is important for the growth of crops. Estimating leaf nitrogen concentration (LNC) accurately and nondestructively is important for precision agriculture, reduces environmental pollution, and helps model global carbon and N cycles. Leaf reflectance, especially in the visible and near-infrared regions, has been identified as a useful indicator of LNC. Except reflectance passively acquired by spectrometers, the newly developed multispectral LiDAR and hyperspectral LiDAR provide possibilities for measuring leaf spectra actively. The regression relationship between leaf reflectance spectra and rice (Oryza sativa) LNC relies greatly on the algorithm adopted. It would be preferable to find one algorithm that performs well with respect to passive and active leaf spectra. Thus, this study assesses the influence of six popular linear and nonlinear methods on rice LNC retrieval, namely, partial least-square regression, least squares boosting, bagging, random forest, back-propagation neural network (BPNN), and support vector regression of different types/kernels/parameter values. The R2, root mean square error and relative error in rice LNC estimation using these different methods were compared through the passive and active spectral measurements of rice leaves of different varieties at different locations and time (Yongyou 4949, Suizhou, 2014, Yangliangyou 6, Wuhan, 2015). Results demonstrate that BPNN provided generally satisfactory performance in estimating rice LNC using the three kinds of passive and active reflectance spectra.