DEEP PHENOTYPING CONSIDERING TILE DRAINAGE FROM UAS-BASED MULTISPECTRAL IMAGERY BY CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS

Abstract. Subsurface agriculture tile lines can greatly impact plant phenotypic characteristics through spatial variation of soil moisture, plant nutrient, and plant rooting depth. Therefore, location of subsurface tile lines plays a critical role in supporting the above ground plant phentoyping and needs to be considered in plant phenotyping analysis. Unnamed Aerial Systems (UAS) imagery together with deep learning methods can develop strong relations between the vegetation spectra and soil parameters.

Here, we consider the capability of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) to evaluate crop quality based on biomass production derived from soil moisture differences by using UAS-based multispectral imagery over soybean breeding fields. Results are still being evaluated, with particular attention to the temporal and spatial resolution of the data required to apply our approach.