A hyperspectral imaging system for an accurate prediction of the above-ground biomass of individual rice plants.

Biomass is an important component of the plant phenomics, and the existing methods for biomass estimation for individual plants are either destructive or lack accuracy. In this study, a hyperspectral imaging system was developed for the accurate prediction of the above-ground biomass of individual rice plants in the visible and near-infrared spectral region. First, the structure of the system and the influence of various parameters on the camera acquisition speed were established. Then the system was used to image 152 rice plants, which selected from the rice mini-core collection, in two stages, the tillering to elongation (T-E) stage and the booting to heading (B-H) stage. Several variables were extracted from the images. Following, linear stepwise regression analysis and 5-fold cross-validation were used to select effective variables for model construction and test the stability of the model, respectively. For the T-E stage, the R(2) value was 0.940 for the fresh weight (FW) and 0.935 for the dry weight (DW). For the B-H stage, the R(2) value was 0.891 for the FW and 0.783 for the DW. Moreover, estimations of the biomass using visible light images were also calculated. These comparisons showed that hyperspectral imaging performed better than the visible light imaging. Therefore, this study provides not only a stable hyperspectral imaging platform but also an accurate and nondestructive method for the prediction of biomass for individual rice plants.