Hidden Markov Models for Real-Time Estimation of Corn Progress Stages Using MODIS and Meteorological Data

Real-time estimation of crop progress stages is critical to the US agricultural economy and decision making. In this paper, a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based method combining multisource features has been presented. The multisource features include mean Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), fractal dimension, and Accumulated Growing Degree Days (AGDDs). In our case, these features are global variable, and measured in the state-level. Moreover, global feature in each Day of Year (DOY) would be impacted by multiple progress stages. Therefore, a mixture model is employed to model the observation probability distribution with all possible stage components. Then, a filtering based algorithm is utilized to estimate the proportion of each progress stage in the real-time. Experiments are conducted in the states of Iowa, Illinois and Nebraska in the USA, and our results are assessed and validated by the Crop Progress Reports (CPRs) of the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). Finally, a quantitative comparison and analysis between our method and spectral pixel-wise based methods is presented. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method for the estimation of corn progress stages. The proposed method could be used as a OPEN ACCESS Remote Sens. 2013, 5 1735 supplementary tool in aid of field survey. Moreover, it also can be used to establish the progress stage estimation model for different types of crops.