Water and Irrigation Management

Water and Irrigation Management

Comparing the accuracy of different image processing methods to estimate sugar beet canopy cover by digital camera images

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors
Seyed Reza Haddadi 1
Masoud Soltani 2
MASOUMEH HASHEMI 3
1 M. Sc. Student, Department of Water Science and Engineering, Faculty of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Imam Khomeini International University, Qazvin, Iran.
2 Assistant Professor, Department of Water Science and Engineering, Faculty of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Imam Khomeini International University, Qazvin, Iran.
3 Researcher, Faculty of Remote Sensing Institute of Civil Engineering, Sharif University, Tehran, Iran.
10.22059/jwim.2022.336225.954
Abstract
In this study, digital photography was used to estimate the amount of sugar beet’s canopy cover. For this purpose, a dataset of visible images of sugar beet crops, during the growing season, in 2018, under drought and nitrogen stress were taken in a greenhouse at the ETH research station for plant sciences in Lindau Eschikon, Switzerland. The treatments of this research included two levels of irrigation stress (low water and sufficient water) and three levels of fertilizer stress (20, 40, and 80 kg/ha nitrogen). Image discrimination and threshold algorithms are applied to perform segmentation on the images in Python. Compound segmentation methods using Excess Green, Excess Green minus Excess Red discrimination vegetation indices (plant from soil and background), and without discrimination index and manual input thresholding and Otsu and Triangle automated algorithms were used. Therefore, nine different compound methods including discrimination and thresholding algorithms used to estimate the canopy cover under different stresses. Results showed that compound methods of Excess Green minus Excess Red vegetation index and manual input thresholding and Excess Green Index and Otsu have the highest accuracy, 94.69 and 87.52 percent, respectively. The method without discrimination index and triangle thresholding which has 53.18 percent accuracy was the least accurate method.
Keywords
Discrimination
Drought stress
Nitrogen stress
segmentation
thresholding
Subjects
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Water and Irrigation Management
Volume 12, Issue 2
Summer 2022
Pages 295-308