Soil Moisture Estimation With SVR and Data Augmentation Based on Alpha Approximation Method

Soil moisture content is an important parameter in hydrological, meteorological, and agricultural applications. Balenzano et al. proposed the alpha approximation method in 2011 for solving some complex issues during the retrieval of soil moisture over agricultural crops with synthetic aperture radar data. However, determining the constraints and solving the underdetermined system of equations in this method add new challenges. Considering the questions of constraints and underdetermined system of equations, the alpha approximation method is used to augment the measured data, and can avoid solving the underdetermined system of equations with constraints directly. Then, these data are applied in a support vector regression machine for soil moisture estimation. It is found that when an optimal model is determined, the method proposed in this article is superior to the direct use of the alpha approximation method, and the root-mean-squared error (RMSE) decreased from 0.0775 to 0.0339 and R 2 increased from 0.0467 to 0.6491. In addition, the method obtained a good result from a data set collected that included a different growing period of crops by changing the standardized method from StandardScaler to Scale , where the RMSE is 0.0501 and R 2 is 0.3204. This indicates the good generalization capability of this method. In conclusion, the proposed method solves the two questions effectively and provides a potential way for long-time or large-scale soil moisture monitoring with much less in situ measurements.