Multifractal methods for rapeseed nitrogen nutrition qualitative diagnosis modeling

Nutrition diagnosis plays a key role in the crop’s growth, which has mainly been carried out in the field by agricultural workers. Currently, automatic nutrition recognition technologies have been widely used in this field. A procedure is proposed in this paper to diagnose nitrogen nutrition non-destructively for rapeseed qualitatively based on the multifractal theory. Twelve texture parameters are given by the method of multifractal detrended fluctuation (MF-DFA), which contains six generalized Hurst exponents and six relative multifractal parameters that are used as features of the rapeseed leaf images for identifying the two nitrogen levels, namely, the N-mezzo and the N-wane. For the base leaves, central leaves and top leaves of the rapeseed plant and the three-section mixed samples, three parameters combinations are selected to conduct the work. Five classifiers of Fisher’s linear discriminant algorithm (LDA), extreme learning machine (ELM), support vector machine and kernel method (SVMKM), random decision forests (RF) and K-nearest neighbor algorithm (KNN) are employed to calculate the diagnosis accuracy. An interesting finding is that the best diagnose accuracy is from the base leaves of the rapeseed plant. It is explained that the base leaf is the most sensitive to the nitrogen deficiency. The diagnose effect by the base leaves samples is outshining the existing result significantly for the same leaves samples. For the mixed samples, the averaged discriminant accuracy reaches 97.12% and 97.56% by SVMKM and RF methods with the 10-fold cross-validation respectively. The resulting high accuracy on N-levels identification shows the feasibility and efficiency of our method.