A cooperative scheme for late leaf spot estimation in peanut using UAV multispectral images

In Australia, peanuts are mainly grown in Queensland with tropical and subtropical climates. The most common foliar disease that poses a severe threat to quality peanut production is late leaf spot (LLS). Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely investigated for various plant trait estimations. The existing works on UAV-based remote sensing have achieved promising results for crop disease estimation using a mean or a threshold value to represent the plot-level image data, but these methods might be insufficient to capture the distribution of pixels within a plot. This study proposes two new methods, namely measurement index (MI) and coefficient of variation (CV), for LLS disease estimation on peanuts. We first investigated the relationship between the UAV-based multispectral vegetation indices (VIs) and the LLS disease scores at the late growth stages of peanuts. We then compared the performances of the proposed MI and CV-based methods with the threshold and mean-based methods for LLS disease estimation. The results showed that the MI-based method achieved the highest coefficient of determination and the lowest error for five of the six chosen VIs whereas the CV-based method performed the best for simple ratio (SR) index among the four methods. By considering the strengths and weaknesses of each method, we finally proposed a cooperative scheme based on the MI, the CV and the mean-based methods for automatic disease estimation, demonstrated by applying this scheme to the LLS estimation in peanuts.