LAI scale effect research based on compact airborne spectrographic imager data in the Heihe Oasis

As one of the key parameters for characterizing crop canopy structure, Leaf Area Index (LAI) has great significance in monitoring the crop growth and estimating the yield. However, due to the nonlinearity and spatial heterogeneity of LAI inversion model, there exists scale error in LAI inversion result, which limits the application of LAI product from different remote sensing data. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct studies on scale effect. This study was based on the Heihe Oasis, Zhangye city, Gansu province, China and the following works were carried out: Airborne hyperspectral CASI (Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imager) image and LAI statistic models were adopted in muti-scale LAI inversion. The overall difference of muti-scale LAI inversion was analyzed in an all-round way. This was based on two aspects, “first inversion and then integration” and “first integration and then inversion”, and on scale difference characteristics of three scale transformation methods. The generation mechanism of scale effect was refined, and the optimal LAI inversion model was expanded by Taylor expansion. By doing so, it quantitatively analyzed the contribution of various inversion processes to scale effect. It was found that the cubic polynomial regression model based on NDVI (940.7 nm, 712 nm) was the optimal model, where its coefficient of determination R2 and the correlation coefficient of test samples R reached 0.72 and 0.936, respectively. Combined with Taylor expansion, it analyzed the scale error generated by LAI inversion model. After the scale effect correction of one-dimensional and two-dimensional variables, the correlation coefficient of CCD-LAI (China Environment Satellite HJ/CCD images) and CASI-LAI products (Compact Airborne Spectro graphic Imager products) increased from 0.793 to 0.875 and 0.901, respectively. The mean value, standard deviation, and relative true value of the two went consistent. Compared with one-dimensional variable correction method, the two-dimensional method had a better correction result. This research used the effective information in hyperspectral data as sub-pixels and adopted Taylor expansion to correct the scale error in large-scale and low-resolution LAI product, achieving large-scale and high-precision LAI monitoring.