Remotely Piloted Aircraft and Random Forest in the Evaluation of the Spatial Variability of Foliar Nitrogen in Coffee Crop

oleh: Diego Bedin Marin, Gabriel Araújo e Silva Ferraz, Paulo Henrique Sales Guimarães, Felipe Schwerz, Lucas Santos Santana, Brenon Dienevam Souza Barbosa, Rafael Alexandre Pena Barata, Rafael de Oliveira Faria, Jessica Ellen Lima Dias, Leonardo Conti, Giuseppe Rossi

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: MDPI AG 2021-04-01

Deskripsi

The development of approaches to determine the spatial variability of nitrogen (N) into coffee leaves is essential to increase productivity and reduce production costs and environmental impacts associated with excessive N applications. Thus, this study aimed to assess the potential of the Random Forest (RF) machine learning method applied to vegetation indices (VI) obtained from Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) images to measure the N content in coffee plants. A total of 10 VI were obtained from multispectral images by a camera attached to a rotary-wing RPA. The RGB orthomosaic was used to determine sampling points at the crop area, which were ranked by N levels in the plants as deficient, critical, or sufficient. The chemical analysis of N content in the coffee leaves, as well as the VI values in sample points, were used as input parameters for the image training and its classification by the RF. The suggested model has shown global accuracy and a kappa coefficient of up to 0.91 and 0.86, respectively. The best results were achieved using the Green Normalized Difference Vegetation (GNDVI) and Green Optimized Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (GOSAVI). In addition, the model enabled the evaluation of the spatial distribution of N in the coffee trees, as well as quantification of N deficiency in the crop for the whole area. The GNDVI and GOSAVI allowed the verification that 22% of the entire crop area had plants with N deficiency symptoms, which would result in a reduction of 78% in the amount of N applied by the producer.