Hyperspectral Remote Sensing in Agriculture-A review

The development of advanced remote capture devices with great spatial and spectral resolution and the ongoing development of more effective computing resources to handle the high volume of data, hyperspectral imaging has turned into a useful remote sensing tool. Hyperspectral image analysis has a significant implication in precision agriculture, where it is possible to access the health status of crops at different stages of the production process from their spectral signatures. The recent developments in hyperspectral remote sensing hold a major key in early diagnosis of abiotic stress over a broader area in non-destructive manner with less effort, expense and time as compared to direct field methods. Abiotic stresses viz. nutrient, cold, drought, salt, heavy metals have become a serious threat to food security. Plants can produce numerous molecular, biochemical and physiological responses to cope up and adapt to such stresses situation. Understanding these minute changes in crop plants in terms of biochemical and biophysical features and physiological processes, which are normally invisible in multispectral remote sensing, is possible with large continuous narrow waveband hyperspectral remote sensing. Many studies on potential applications of hyper spectral remote sensing in agriculture to assess abiotic and biotic stresses have been carried out by different researchers in India and abroad (Shobiga and Kumar, 2015). However, due to the low spectral resolution, multispectral broadband-based remote sensing is limited in its ability to quantitatively estimate biochemical properties. In this paper we have described about the principles and procedures of hyperspectral remote sensing in agriculture.