Reducing the dimensionality of plant spectral databases

Ground-based measurements of plant reflectance and transmittance are essential for remote sensing projects oriented toward agriculture, forestry, and ecology. This paper examines the application of principal components analysis (PCA) in the storage and reconstruction of such plant spectral data. A novel piecewise PCA approach (PPCA), which takes into account the biological factors that affect the interaction of solar radiation with plants, is also proposed. These techniques are compared through experiments involving the reconstruction of reflectance and transmittance curves for herbaceous and woody specimens. The spectral data used in these experiments were obtained from the Leaf Optical Properties Experiment (LOPEX) database. The reconstructions were performed aiming at a root-mean-square error lower than 1%. The results of these experiments indicate that PCA can effectively reduce the dimensionality of plant spectral databases from the visible to the infrared regions of the light spectrum, and that the PPCA approach can further maximize the accuracy/cost ratio of the storage and reconstruction of plant spectral reflectance and transmittance data.