A Sensitive Wavebands Identification System for Smart Farming

摘要

Sensing the content of macronutrients in the agricultural soil is anessential task in precision agriculture. It helps the farmers in the optimal use offertilizers. It reduces the cost of food production and also the negative environmentalimpacts on atmosphere and water bodies due to indiscriminate dosageof fertilizers. The traditional chemical-based laboratory soil analysis methodsdo not serve the purpose as they are hardly suitable for site specific soil management.Moreover, the spectral range used in the chemical-based laboratory soil analysismay be of 350–2500 nm, which leads to redundancy and confusion.Developing sensors based on the discovery of spectral wavebands that respondto soil macronutrient concentrations, on the other hand, is an innovative and successfultechnology since the results are dependable and timely. The goal of thisarticle is to use a supervised neuro-fuzzy based dimensionality reduction approachin the sensor development process to determine sensitive wavebands of soilmacronutrients. Accordingly, the spectral signatures of the soil are collected inan outdoor environment and mapped with its macronutrient concentrations. In thisspectral analysis, the spectral reflectance of 424 wavelengths has been obtainedand these wavelengths are evaluated through combined and individual modesas well. Appropriate wavelengths are selected in each case by minimizing the fuzzyreflectance assessment index. The effectiveness of these selected wavelengthsin each mode is validated by modeling the relation between the reduced reflectancespace and each macronutrient concentration using Partial Least SquaresMulti Variable Regression (PLS-MVR) method. Set of optimal wavebands areidentified and the results are compared with the existing systems.