Reinforcement learning based dynamic vegetation index formulation for rice crop stress detection using satellite and...

Timely crop stress detection is essential for safeguarding yields and promoting sustainable agriculture. Traditional vegetation indices (e.g., NDVI, EVI) are widely used but remain static, crop-agnostic, and often insensitive to early stress signals. This study proposed RL-VI, a reinforcement learning-based framework that dynamically formulates vegetation indices optimized for rice stress detection. Unlike existing methods, RL-VI integrates Sentinel-2 multispectral imagery with smartphone-captured RGB data, creating the first cross-platform environment where vegetation indices are learned rather than predefined. The reinforcement learning agent adaptively selects stress-sensitive spectral band combinations guided by classification rewards. Experiments on real-world rice fields in Tamil Nadu, India, and benchmark datasets (Indian Pines, wheat salt stress) show that RL-VI achieves an overall accuracy of 89.4% and F1-score of 0.88, outperforming static and machine-learned indices by up to 12%. Importantly, RL-VI enables early stress detection up to 10 14 days before visible symptoms, providing actionable lead time for intervention. The proposed framework is computationally lightweight and scalable to UAV or edge devices, offering a farmer-ready tool for precision agriculture, bridging field-level mobile sensing with satellite monitoring for low-cost, real-time crop health management. Statistical validation using ANOVA (F = 88.24, p < 0.001) and pairwise t-tests (p < 0.001) confirmed RL-VI's superiority, while SHAP analyses emphasized the physiological significance of red-edge and SWIR bands in stress discrimination.