Nondestructive Determination of Leaf Nitrogen Content in Corn by Hyperspectral Imaging Using Spectral and Texture Fusion

The nitrogen content is an important indicator affecting corn plants’ growth status. Most of the standard hyperspectral imaging-based techniques for nondestructive detection of crop nitrogen content use a single feature as the input variable of the model, which reduces the generalization ability of the prediction model. To this end, a prediction model for the nitrogen content of corn leaves based on the fusion of image and spectral features is proposed. In this study, corn leaves at the modulation stage were studied, samples with different nitrogen levels were numbered, and their hyperspectral data in the wavelength range of 400~1100 nm were collected. The average spectrum of the models was used as valid spectral information. First-order derivatives, standard normal variables transformation (SNV), Savitzky-Golay (S-G) smoothing, and normalization were selected to preprocess the spectral features. The CARS-SPA algorithm was used to screen sensitive spectral variables. The gray level co-currency matrix (GLCM) was chosen to extract the texture image features of the test samples. Corn leaf spectral and texture image features were fused and modeled as target features. Partial least squares regression (PLSR) and support vector machine regression (SVR) were used to predict corn leaves’ nitrogen content. The results showed that the image and spectral-based fusion models improved the prediction performance to some extent compared to the univariate models. The PLSR model based on feature fusion predicted the best results, in which the RP2 and RMSEP were 0.987 and 0.047. This method provides a reliable theoretical basis and technical support for developing nondestructive and accurate detection of nitrogen content in corn leaves.