Optimizing window size and directional parameters of GLCM texture features for estimating rice AGB based on UAVs multispectral imagery

Aboveground biomass (AGB) is a crucial physiological parameter for monitoring crop growth, assessing nutrient status, and predicting yield. Texture features (TFs) derived from remote sensing images have been proven to be crucial for estimating crops AGB, which can effectively address the issue of low accuracy in AGB estimation solely based on spectral information. TFs exhibit sensitivity to the size of the moving window and directional parameters, resulting in a substantial impact on AGB estimation. However, few studies systematically assessed the effects of moving window and directional parameters for TFs extraction on rice AGB estimation. To this end, this study used Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to acquire multispectral imagery during crucial growth stages of rice and evaluated the performance of TFs derived with different grey level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) parameters by random forest (RF) regression model. Meanwhile, we analyzed the importance of TFs under the optimal parameter settings. The results indicated that: (1) the appropriate window size for extracting TFs varies with the growth stages of rice plant, wherein a small-scale window demonstrates advantages during the early growth stages, while the opposite holds during the later growth stages; (2) TFs derived from 45° direction represent the optimal choice for estimating rice AGB. During the four crucial growth stages, this selection improved performance in AGB estimation with R ² = 0.76 to 0.83 and rRMSE = 13.62% to 21.33%. Furthermore, the estimation accuracy for the entire growth season is R ² =0.84 and rRMSE =21.07%. However, there is no consensus regarding the selection of the worst TFs computation direction; (3) Correlation (Cor), Mean, and Homogeneity (Hom) from the first principal component image reflecting internal information of rice plant and Contrast (Con), Dissimilarity (Dis), and Second Moment (SM) from the second principal component image expressing edge texture are more important to estimate rice AGB among the whole growth stages; and (4) Considering the optimal parameters, the accuracy of texture-based AGB estimation slightly outperforms the estimation accuracy based on spectral reflectance alone. In summary, the present study can help researchers confident use of GLCM-based TFs to enhance the estimation accuracy of physiological and biochemical parameters of crops.