Estimating Rice Yield by HJ-1A Satellite Images

As illustrated by the case of Xuyi County, Jinhu County and Hongze County in Jiangsu Province, China, monitoring and forecasting of rice production were carried out by using HJ-1A satellite remote sensing images. The handhold GPS machines were used to measure the geographical position and some other information of these samples such as area shape. The GPS data and the interpretation marks were used to correct HJ-1 image, assist human-computer interactive interpretation, and other operations. The test data had been participated in the whole classification process. The accuracy of interpreted information on rice planting area was more than 90%. By using the leaf area index from the normalized difference vegetation index inversion, the biomass from the ratio vegetation index inversion, and combined with the rice yield estimation model, the rice yield was estimated. Further, the thematic map of rice production classification was made based on the rice yield data. According to the comparison results between measured and fitted values of yields and areas of sampling sites, the accuracy of the yield estimation was more than 85%. The results suggest that HJ-A/B images could basically meet the demand of rice growth monitoring and yield forecasting, and could be widely applied to rice production monitoring.