Phenotyping agronomic and physiological traits in peanut under mid‐season drought stress using UAV‐based hyperspectral imaging and machine learning

Abstract

Abstract Agronomic and physiological traits in peanut ( Arachis hypogaea ) are important to breeders for selecting high‐yielding and resilient genotypes. However, direct measurement of these traits is labor‐intensive and time‐consuming. This study assessed the feasibility of using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)‐based hyperspectral imaging and machine learning (ML) techniques to predict three agronomic traits (biomass, pod count, and yield) and two physiological traits (photosynthesis and stomatal conductance) in peanut under drought stress. Two different approaches were evaluated. The first approach employed eighty narrowband vegetation indices as input features for an ensemble model that included K‐nearest neighbors, support vector regression, random forest, and multi‐layer perceptron (MLP). The second approach utilized mean and standard deviation of canopy spectral reflectance per band. The resultant 400 features were used to train a deep learning (DL) model consisting of one‐dimensional convolutional layers followed by an MLP regressor. Predictions of the agronomic traits obtained using feature learning and DL ( R 2 = 0.45–0.73; symmetric mean absolute percentage error [sMAPE] = 24%–51%) outperformed those obtained using feature engineering and conventional ML models ( R 2 = 0.44–0.61, sMAPE = 27%–59%). In contrast, the ensemble model had a slightly better performance in predicting physiological traits ( R 2 = 0.35–0.57; sMAPE = 37%–70%) compared to the results obtained from the DL model ( R 2 = 0.36–0.52; sMAPE = 47%–64%). The results showed that the combination of UAV‐based hyperspectral imaging and ML techniques have the potential to assist breeders in rapid screening of genotypes for improved yield and drought tolerance in peanut.

Plant phenotyping relevance

UAVハイパースペクトル画像と機械学習による植物形質の推定手法を開発・比較評価しており、表現型取得・抽出が研究の中心である。

Code and data availability

The supplied article blocks describe UAV hyperspectral phenotyping of peanut traits with ML/DL models, but contain no data availability statement, no public dataset deposit, and no author code/model release. All URLs present are references, ORCID profiles, or the article/terms pages; none is a paper-specific public or

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