Investigation of the saturation effect of vegetation indices in LAI estimation of crops

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Remote Sensing and GIS department, School of Geography, University of Tehran

2 Assistant Professor in Remote Sensing, Remote Sensing and GIS Research Center

3 Remote sensing expert, Iranian Space Research Center

4 Professor in Remote Sensing, Remote Sensing and GIS Research Center

Abstract

Vegetation indices are used to estimate vegetation parameters from satellite images. Despite their capabilities, performance of some vegetation indices decreases in high vegetation densities, making them inappropriate for estimation of the desired parameters. Vegetation indices are saturated in alfalfa farms due to the high chlorophyll content and high vegetation density; therefore, monitoring the changes of this plant is hindered. However, all indices do not perform similarly. In this research, the performance of different vegetation indices at different LAI values were investigated. The results showed that the CIgreen, CIrededge and NGRDI indices gained the best performance at high LAI values and they were less saturated. In contrast, the NDVI, NDREI and GNDI indices did not perform well and they were saturated at medium and high levels of LAI.

Keywords

References

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