Abstract: Hyperspectral reflectance (350~2500 nm) data were recorded at two different sites of rice in two experiment fields including two cultivars, and three levels of nitrogen (N) application. Twenty-five Vegetation Indices (VIs) were used to predict the rice agronomic parameters including Leaf Area Index (LAI, m² green leaf/m² soil) and Green Leaf Chlorophyll Density (GLCD, mg chlorophyll/m² soil) by the traditional regression models and Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBF). RBF emerged as a variant of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in the late 1980’s. A large variety of training algorithms has been tested for training RBF networks. In this study, Original RBF (ORBF), Gradient Descent RBF (GDRBF), and Generalized Regression Neural Network (GRNN) were employed. Results showed that green waveband Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI_green) and TCARI/OSAVI have the best prediction power for LAI by exponent model and ORBF respectively, and that TCARI/OSAVI has the best prediction power for GLCD by exponent model and GDRBF. The best performances of RBF are compared with the traditional models, showing that the relationship between VIs and agronomic variables are further improved when RBF is used. Compared with the best traditional models, ORBF using TCARI/OSAVI improves the prediction power for LAI by lowering the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) for 0.1119, and GDRBF using TCARI/OSAVI improves the prediction power for GLCD by lowering the RMSE for 26.7853. It is concluded that RBF provides a useful exploratory and predictive tool when applied to the sensitive VIs.

Key words: Artificial neural network (ANN), Radial basis function (RBF), Remote sensing, Rice, Vegetation index (VI)

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