Development of an optical sensor for crop leaf chlorophyll content detection

Nitrogen content in crop leaf is an important indication for evaluating crop health and predicting crop yield. A normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is widely used as an indicator in estimating leaf nitrogen content in practice. How to effectively and accurately measure the NDVI value of crop leaves in the field is a challenge on in-field use instrument development. This paper reports the development of a hand-held spectroscopy-based optical sensing device for measuring crop leaf NDVI values under in-field natural light conditions. This optical sensing device could simultaneously measure the spectral reflectance of canopies and the solar intensity at two bands of 610 and 1220 nm, and calculate NDVI value in real-time based on measured spectral reflectance. This device was tested in tomato plants chlorophyll content measurement. A series of field tests were conducted to evaluate the performance of the sensor, and tomato leaf samples were collected for measuring chlorophyll contents as the reference for validation. Obtained results indicated that NDVI values measured with this sensing device had a close correlation with chlorophyll contents of the collected leaf samples measured in laboratory with a UV–vis spectrophotometer (ROpt2=0.66).