Entropy Weight Ensemble Framework for Yield Prediction of Winter Wheat Under Different Water Stress Treatments Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Based Multispectral and Thermal Data - PubMed Skip to main page content
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. 2021 Dec 20:12:730181.
doi: 10.3389/fpls.2021.730181. eCollection 2021.

Entropy Weight Ensemble Framework for Yield Prediction of Winter Wheat Under Different Water Stress Treatments Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Based Multispectral and Thermal Data

Affiliations

Entropy Weight Ensemble Framework for Yield Prediction of Winter Wheat Under Different Water Stress Treatments Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Based Multispectral and Thermal Data

Shuaipeng Fei et al. Front Plant Sci. .

Abstract

Crop breeding programs generally perform early field assessments of candidate selection based on primary traits such as grain yield (GY). The traditional methods of yield assessment are costly, inefficient, and considered a bottleneck in modern precision agriculture. Recent advances in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and development of sensors have opened a new avenue for data acquisition cost-effectively and rapidly. We evaluated UAV-based multispectral and thermal images for in-season GY prediction using 30 winter wheat genotypes under 3 water treatments. For this, multispectral vegetation indices (VIs) and normalized relative canopy temperature (NRCT) were calculated and selected by the gray relational analysis (GRA) at each growth stage, i.e., jointing, booting, heading, flowering, grain filling, and maturity to reduce the data dimension. The elastic net regression (ENR) was developed by using selected features as input variables for yield prediction, whereas the entropy weight fusion (EWF) method was used to combine the predicted GY values from multiple growth stages. In our results, the fusion of dual-sensor data showed high yield prediction accuracy [coefficient of determination (R 2) = 0.527-0.667] compared to using a single multispectral sensor (R 2 = 0.130-0.461). Results showed that the grain filling stage was the optimal stage to predict GY with R 2 = 0.667, root mean square error (RMSE) = 0.881 t ha-1, relative root-mean-square error (RRMSE) = 15.2%, and mean absolute error (MAE) = 0.721 t ha-1. The EWF model outperformed at all the individual growth stages with R 2 varying from 0.677 to 0.729. The best prediction result (R 2 = 0.729, RMSE = 0.831 t ha-1, RRMSE = 14.3%, and MAE = 0.684 t ha-1) was achieved through combining the predicted values of all growth stages. This study suggests that the fusion of UAV-based multispectral and thermal IR data within an ENR-EWF framework can provide a precise and robust prediction of wheat yield.

Keywords: UAV; machine learning; multispectral indices; remote sensing; thermal infrared; wheat yield.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The reviewer AR declared a past co-authorship with the authors MH, YX to the handling editor.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Experimental location, design, and management.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Schematic workflow of the methodology used in this study. P denotes the predicted grain yield (GY) value, and C1–C8 indicate the combinations of the values predicted from multiple growth stages. CV, cross-validation; VIs, vegetation indices; NRCT, normalized relative canopy temperature.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Grain yield distribution curves under various irrigation treatments.
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Model training error as a function of the number of features. The order of input of features depends on the gray relational degree (GRD). MAE, mean absolute error.
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 5
Statistical distributions of (A) coefficient of determination (R2), (B) root mean square error (RMSE), (C) relative root-mean-square error (RRMSE), and (D) mean absolute error (MAE) of the elastic net regression (ENR) algorithm for GY prediction using multispectral features in test phases. JS, jointing stage; BS, booting stage; HS, heading stage; FS, flowering stage; GFS, grain filling stage; MS, maturity stage.
FIGURE 6
FIGURE 6
Statistical distributions of (A) R2, (B) RMSE, (C) RRMSE, and (D) MAE of the ENR for GY prediction using both multispectral and thermal features in test phases. JS, jointing stage; BS, booting stage; HS, heading stage; FS, flowering stage; GFS, grain filling stage; MS, maturity stage.
FIGURE 7
FIGURE 7
Regression plots, density curve, and R2-values between predicted GY in six developmental stages.
FIGURE 8
FIGURE 8
Statistical distributions of (A) R2, (B) RMSE, (C) RRMSE, and (D) MAE of the ENR model that uses both multispectral and thermal features from different stages as inputs.
FIGURE 9
FIGURE 9
Statistical distributions of (A) R2, (B) RMSE, (C) RRMSE, and (D) MAE of the entropy weight fusion (EWF) method for GY prediction in the test phases.
FIGURE 10
FIGURE 10
Results from paired t-test between model R2 obtained from the EWF method and the individual stages. *** significant at P ≤ 0.001; JS, jointing stage; BS, booting stage; HS, heading stage; FS, flowering stage; GFS, grain filling stage; MS, maturity stage.

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