[Monitoring of winter wheat stripe rust based on the spectral knowledge base for TM images]

In most cases, the reversion model for monitoring the severity degree of stripe rust based on the hyperspectral information can not be directly applied by the satellite images with relatively broad bandwidth, while the airborne hyperspectral images can not be applied for large-scale monitoring either, due to the scale limitation of its data and high cost. For resolving this dilemma, we developed a monitoring method based on PHI images, which relies on the construction of spectral knowledge base of winter wheat stripe rust. Three PHI images corresponding to the winter wheat experimental field that included different severity degree of stripe rust were used as a medium to establish the spectral knowledge base of relationships between disease index (DI) and the simulated reflectance of TM bands by using the empirical reversion model of DI(%) and the relative spectral response (RSR) function of TM-5 sensor. Based on this, we can monitor and identify the winter wheat stripe rust by matching the spectral information of an untested pixel to the spectral knowledge base via Mahalanobis distance or spectral angle mapping (SAM). The precision of monitoring was validated by simulated TM pixels, while the effectiveness of identification was tested by pixels from TM images. The results showed that the method can provide high precision for monitoring and reasonable accuracy for identification in some certain growth stages of winter wheat. Based on the simulated TM pixels, the model performed best in the pustulation period, yielded a coefficient of determination R2 = 0.93, while the precision of estimates dropped in the milk stage, and performed worst in the jointing stage, which is basically inappropriate for monitoring. Moreover, by using the pixels from TM images, the infected pixels could be identified accurately in pustulation and milk stages, while failed to be identified in jointing stage. For matching algorithms, the Mahalanobis distance method produced a slightly better result than SAM method.