A new vegetation index based on UAV for extracting plateau vegetation information

Abstract

In the realm of remote sensing, the vegetation index (VI) can bring out the subtleties and characteristics of a class of features or a specific feature and can indicate crop development, vegetation and non-vegetation, soil, and other related information. However, in the plateau region, due to characteristics such as plant type, soil type, and vegetation density, the currently available vegetation indices cannot properly extract vegetation information. Therefore, this study proposes a visible light vegetation index based on the visible band, the Improved-Red-Green-Blue Vegetation Index (IRGBVI), by analyzing the spectral characteristics of seven species of landforms in the visible light bands of the UAV in the plateau region, and applies this VI to compare the accuracy of vegetation information extraction with that of 13 VIs based on visible light bands. The investigation demonstrates that IRGBVI can successfully extract plant information with high accuracy in different regions of the plateau and can effectively eliminate the impacts of blue roofs and other factors in images. In conclusion, IRGBVI is a novel visible light vegetation index ideal for extracting vegetation information in plateau regions, and it has strong generalizability and reliability.

Keywords

• Visible light vegetation index
• Plateaus
• Unmanned aerial vehicles
• New red-green-blue vegetation index