Improving detection of wheat canopy chlorophyll content based on inhomogeneous light correction

Effectively improving the detection accuracy of wheat chlorophyll content is of great significance for the detection of photosynthetic capacity and growth status of wheat canopy. However, due to inhomogeneous light distribution issues in canopy, the existence of shaded and sun wheat leaves in wheat canopy has influence for spectral-based detection of chlorophyll content. Therefore, in order to improve detection of wheat canopy chlorophyll content, a light distribution correction method was proposed to correct intact leaves’ light distribution based on shaded and sun leaves in multispectral images. Firstly, R-G-NIR images were reconstructed to segment and analyze shaded and sun leaves of wheat. Secondly, Homomorphic Filter (HF) and Gamma light correction method was used to optimize shaded leaves’ light distribution. Then, the differential responses of 10 different types of vegetation indices in shaded, sun, original intact and corrected intact leaves were analyzed to screen chlorophyll-sensitive parameters based on Random Frog Method (RFM). Finally, Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Regression (SVR), and Partial Least Squares Regression (PLSR) were used to establish models for the detection of chlorophyll content in shaded, sun, original intact and corrected intact leaves of wheat, respectively. The results showed that the proposed light correction method reduced the inhomogeneous light and kept more uniform. Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), green normalized difference vegetation index (GNDVI), difference vegetation index (DVI), normalized redness intensity (NRI), and optimized soil-adjusted vegetation index (OSAVI) were selected as the optimal spectral variables. And the models after correction had higher accuracy than the models before correction. The wheat chlorophyll content model of corrected intact leaves based on RF had the highest accuracy, with a calibration set $R_c^2$ of 0.816, ${RMSE}_c$ of 3.702, a validation set $R_v^2$ of 0.804, ${RMSE}_v$ of 3.958, respectively. The research integrates the above results to improve detection of wheat canopy chlorophyll content, which provides technical support for the light distribution correction in multispectral images.