The quality of grapes in the production of wine is highly influenced by vine water status, where optimal water deficit or selective harvesting can improve berry quality. It is in this context that the rapid advancement in small unmanned aerial system (sUAS) technology and the potential application of real-time, high-spatial resolution hyperspectral imagery for vineyard moisture assessment, have become tractable. This study sought to further sUAS hyperspectral imagery as a tool to model water status in a commercial vineyard in Upstate New York. High-spatial resolution (2.5 cm ground sample distance) hyperspectral data were collected in the visible/near-infrared (VNIR; 400-1000nm) regime on three flight days. A Scholander pressure chamber was used to directly measure the midday stem water potential (Ψstem) within imaged vines at the time of flight. High spatial resolution pixels enabled the targeting of pure (sunlit) vine canopy with vertically trained shoots and significant shadowing. We used the partial least squares-regression (PLS-R) modeling method to correlate our hyperspectral imagery with measured field water status and applied a wavelength band selection scheme to detect important wavelengths. We evaluated spectral smoothing and band reduction approaches, given signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) concerns. Our regression results indicated that unsmoothed curves, with the range of wavelength bands from 450- 1000 nm, provided the highest model performance with R2 = 0.68 for cross-validation. Future work will include hyperspectral flight data in the short-wave infrared (SWIR; 1000-2500 nm) regime that were also collected. Ultimately, models will need validation in different vineyards with a full range of plant stress.
The use of small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) for applications in the field of precision agriculture has demonstrated the need to produce temporally consistent imagery to allow for quantitative comparisons. In order for these aerial images to be used to identify actual changes on the ground, conversion of raw digital count to reflectance, or to an atmospherically normalized space, needs to be carried out. This paper will describe an experiment that compares the use of reflectance calibration panels, for use with the empirical line method (ELM), against a newly proposed ratio of the target radiance and the downwelling radiance, to predict the reflectance of known targets in the scene. We propose that the use of an on-board downwelling light sensor (DLS) may provide the sUAS remote sensing practitioner with an approach that does not require the expensive and time consuming task of placing known reflectance standards in the scene. Three calibration methods were tested in this study: 2-Point ELM, 1-Point ELM, and At-altitude Radiance Ratio (AARR). Our study indicates that the traditional 2-Point ELM produces the lowest mean error in band effective reflectance factor, 0.0165. The 1-Point ELM and AARR produce mean errors of 0.0343 and 0.0287 respectively. A modeling of the proposed AARR approach indicates that the technique has the potential to perform better than the 2-Point ELM method, with a 0.0026 mean error in band effective reflectance factor, indicating that this newly proposed technique may prove to be a viable alternative with suitable on-board sensors.
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