Reducing background effects in orchards through spectral vegetation index correction

Firstly, the problem was demonstrated in a controlled environment for vegetation indices sensitive to chlorophyll content, water content and leaf area index. Afterwards, traditional background correction methods (i.e. soil-adjusted vegetation indices and signal unmixing) were compared to the proposed vegetation index correction. This correction was based on the mixing degree of each pixel (i.e. tree cover fraction) to rescale the vegetation indices accordingly and was applied to synthetic and WorldView-2 satellite imagery. Through the correction, the effect of background admixture for vegetation indices was reduced, and the estimation of biophysical variables was improved (ΔR2 = 0.2-0.31).