Remote Sensing Monitoring of Rice Grain Protein Content Based on a Multidimensional Euclidean Distance Method

Grain protein content (GPC) is an important indicator of nutritional quality of rice. In this study, nitrogen fertilization experiments were conducted to monitor GPC for high-quality Indica rice varieties Meixiangzhan 2 (V1) and Wufengyou 615 (V2) in 2019 and 2020. Three types of parameters, including photosynthetic sensitive vegetation indices (VIs), canopy leaf area index (LAI), and crop plant nitrogen accumulation (PNA), obtained from UAV hyperspectral images were used to estimate rice GPC. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional GPC indices were constructed by combining any two of the three types of parameters and all three, respectively, based on the Euclidean distance method. The R-2 and RMSE of the two-dimensional GPC index model for variety V1 at the tillering stage were 0.81 and 0.40% for modeling and 0.95 and 0.38% for validation, and 0.91 and 0.27% for modeling and 0.83 and 0.36% for validation for variety V2. The three-dimensional GPC index model for variety V1 had R-2 and RMSE of 0.86 and 0.34% for modeling and 0.78 and 0.45% for validation, and 0.97 and 0.17% for modeling and 0.96 and 0.17% for validation for variety V2 at the panicle initiation stage. At the heading stage, the R-2 and RMSE of the three-dimensional model for variety V1 were 0.92 and 0.26% for modeling and 0.91 and 0.37% for validation, and 0.96 and 0.20% for modeling and 0.99 and 0.15% for validation for variety V2. These results demonstrate that the GPC monitoring models incorporating multiple crop growth parameters based on Euclidean distance can improve GPC estimation accuracy and have the potential for field-scale GPC monitoring.