With the rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and sensor technology, UAVs that can simultaneously carry different sensors have been increasingly used to monitor nitrogen status in crops due to their flexibility and adaptability. This study aimed to explore how to use the image information combined from two different sensors mounted on an UAV to evaluate leaf nitrogen content (LNC) in corn. Field experiments with corn were conducted using different nitrogen rates and cultivars at the National Precision Agriculture Research and Demonstration Base in China in 2017. Digital RGB and multispectral images were obtained synchronously by UAV in the V12, R1, and R3 growth stages of corn, respectively. A novel family of modified vegetation indices, named coverage adjusted spectral indices (CASIs (CASI $=\mathrm{VI}/\left(1+{\mathrm{FV}}_{\mathrm{cover}}\right)$, where VI denotes the reference vegetation index and ${\mathrm{FV}}_{\mathrm{cover}}$ refers to the fraction of vegetation coverage), has been introduced to estimate LNC in corn. Thereby, typical VIs were extracted from multispectral images, which have the advantage of relatively higher spectral resolution, and ${\mathrm{FV}}_{\mathrm{cover}}$ was calculated by RGB images that feature higher spatial resolution. Then, the PLS (partial least squares) method was employed to investigate the relationships between LNC and the optimal set of CASIs or VIs selected by the RFA (random frog algorithm) in different corn growth stages. The analysis results indicated that whether removing soil noise or not, CASIs guaranteed a better estimation of LNC than VIs for all of the three growth stages of corn, and the usage of CASIs in the R1 stage yielded the best R² value of 0.59, with a RMSE (root mean square error) of 22.02% and NRMSE (normalized root mean square error) of 8.37%. It was concluded that CASIs, based on the fusion of information acquired synchronously from both lower resolution multispectral and higher resolution RGB images, have a good potential for crop nitrogen monitoring by UAV. Furthermore, they could also serve as a useful way for assessing other physical and chemical parameters in further applications for crops.

LNC (leaf nitrogen content) in crops is significant for diagnosing the crop growth status and guiding fertilization decisions. Currently, UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) remote sensing has played an important role in estimating the nitrogen nutrition of crops at the field scale. However, many existing methods of evaluating crop nitrogen based on UAV imaging techniques usually have used a single type of imagery such as RGB or multispectral images, seldom considering the usage of information fusion from different types of UAV imagery for assessing the crop nitrogen status. In this study, GS (Gram–Schmidt Pan Sharpening) was utilized to fuse images from two sensors of digital RGB and multispectral cameras mounted on UAV, and the specific bands of the multispectral cameras are blue, green, red, rededge and NIR. The color space transformation method, HSV (Hue-Saturation-Value), was used to separate soil background noise from crops due to the high spatial resolution of UAV images. Two methods of optimizing feature variables, the Successive Projection Algorithm (SPA) and the Competitive Adaptive Reweighted Sampling method (CARS), combined with two regularization regression algorithms, LASSO and RIDGE, were adopted to estimate the LNC, compared to the commonly used Random Forest algorithm. The results showed that: (1) the accuracy of LNC estimation using the fusion image is improved distinctly by a comparison to the original multispectral image; (2) the denoised images performed better than the original multispectral images in evaluating LNC in rice; (3) the RIDGE-SPA combined method, using SPA to select the MCARI, SAVI and OSAVI, had the best performance for LNC in rice, with an R² of 0.76 and an RMSE of 10.33%. It can be demonstrated that the information fusion of multiple-sensor imagery from UAV coupling with the methods of optimizing feature variables can estimate the rice LNC more effectively, which can also provide a reference for guiding the decision making of fertilization in rice fields.

Crop yields are important for food security and people’s living standards, and it is therefore very important to predict the yield in a timely manner. This study used different vegetation indices and red-edge parameters calculated based on the canopy reflectance obtained from near-surface hyperspectral data and UAV hyperspectral data and used the partial least squares regression (PLSR) and artificial neural network (ANN) methods to estimate the yield of winter wheat at different growth stages. Verification was performed based on these two types of hyperspectral remote sensing data and the yield was estimated using vegetation indices and a combination of vegetation indices and red-edge parameters as the modeling independent variables, respectively, using PLSR and ANN regression, respectively. The results showed that, for the same data source, the optimal vegetation index for estimating the yield was the same in all of the studied growth stages; however, the optimal red-edge parameters were different for different growth stages. Compared with using only the vegetation indices as the modeling factor to estimate yield, the combination of the vegetation indices and red-edge parameters obtained superior estimation results. Additionally, the accuracy of yield estimation was shown to be improved by using the PLSR and ANN methods, with the yield estimation model constructed using the PLSR method having a better prediction effect. Moreover, the yield prediction model obtained using the near-surface hyperspectral sensors had a higher fitting and accuracy than the model obtained using the UAV hyperspectral remote sensing data (the results were based on the specific growth stressors, N and water supply). This study shows that the use of a combination of vegetation indices and red-edge parameters achieved an improved yield estimation compared to the use of vegetation indices alone. In the future, the selection of suitable sensors and methods needs to be considered when constructing models to estimate crop yield.

Industrialization production with high quality and effect on winter is an important measure for accelerating the shift from increasing agricultural production to improving quality in terms of grain protein content (GPC). Remote sensing technology achieved the GPC prediction. However, large deviations in interannual expansion and regional transfer still exist. The present experiment was carried out in wheat producing areas of Beijing (BJ), Renqiu (RQ), Quzhou, and Jinzhou in Hebei Province. First, the spectral consistency of Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (LS8) and RapidEye (RE) was compared with Sentinel-2 (S2) satellites at the same ground point in the same period. The GPC prediction model was constructed by coupling the vegetation index with the meteorological data obtained by the European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasts using hierarchical linear model (HLM) method. The prediction and spatial expansion of regional GPC were validated. Results were as follows: (1) Spectral information calculated from S2 imagery were highly consistent with LS8 (R² = 1.00) and RE (R² = 0.99) imagery, which could be jointly used for GPC modeling. (2) The predicted GPC by using the HLM method (R² = 0.524) demonstrated higher accuracy than the empirical linear model (R² = 0.286) and showed higher improvements across inter-annual and regional scales. (3) The GPC prediction results of the verification samples in RQ, BJ, Xiaotangshan (XTS) in 2018, and XTS in 2019 were ideal with root mean square errors of 0.61%, 1.13%, 0.91%, and 0.38%, and relative root mean square error of 4.11%, 6.83%, 6.41%, and 2.58%, respectively. This study has great application potential for regional and inter-annual quality prediction.

Crop production is one of the major interactions between humans and the natural environment, in the process, carbon is translocated cyclically inside the ecosystem. Data assimilation algorithm has advantages in mechanism and robustness in yield estimation, however, the computational efficiency is still a major obstacle for widespread application. To address the issue, a novel hybrid method based on the combination of the Crop Biomass Algorithm of Wheat (CBA-Wheat) to the Simple Algorithm For Yield (SAFY) model and the transfer learning method was proposed in this paper, which enables winter wheat yield estimation with acceptable accuracy and calculation efficiency. The transfer learning techniques learn the knowledge from the SAFY model and then use the knowledge to predict wheat yield. The main results showed that: (1) The comparison using CBA-Wheat between measured AGB and predicted AGB all reveal a good correlation with R² of 0.83 and RMSE of 1.91 t ha⁻¹, respectively; (2) The performance of yield prediction was as follows: transfer learning method (R² of 0.64, RMSE of 1.05 t ha⁻¹) and data assimilation (R² of 0.64, RMSE of 1.01 t ha⁻¹). At the farm scale, the two yield estimation models are still similar in performance with RMSE of 1.33 t ha⁻¹ for data assimilation and 1.13 t ha⁻¹ for transfer learning; (3) The time consumption of transfer learning with complete simulation data set is significantly lower than that of the other two yield estimation tests. The number of pixels to be simulated was about 16,000, and the computational efficiency of the data assimilation algorithm and transfer learning without complete simulation datasets. The transfer learning model shows great potential in improving the efficiency of production estimation.