Journal of Agricultural Big Data ›› 2026, Vol. 8 ›› Issue (3): 281-295.doi: 10.19788/j.issn.2096-6369.000161

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Research on a Low-Altitude Remote Sensing Segmentation Model for Sugarcane Drought Level Identification

WANG ZhengFeng1(), LI Li2, MA RuiSheng3, MO YunJie4, KUANG ZhaoMin3,*()   

  1. 1 School of Computer Science and Engineering (School of Artificial Intelligence), Guilin University of Technology/Guangxi Key Laboratory of Embedded Technology and Intelligent Systems, Guilin 541006, Guangxi, China
    2 Guangxi Climate Center, Nanning 530022, China
    3 Guangxi Institute of Meteorological Sciences, Nanning 530022, China
    4 Guangxi Meteorological Technology Equipment Center, Nanning 530022, China
  • Received:2026-04-26 Accepted:2026-07-15 Online:2026-09-26 Published:2026-10-08
  • Contact: KUANG ZhaoMin

Abstract:

To address the limitation of drought assessment and early warning methods relying primarily on single meteorological indicators in accurately reflecting sugarcane growth, this study constructs an intelligent method for identifying sugarcane drought levels by integrating low-altitude remote sensing imagery and a deep learning model. Low-altitude remote sensing imagery of healthy and drought-stressed sugarcane fields was collected in three typical planting areas. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was calculated and drought level labels were established based on expert interpretation. Based on the U-Net semantic segmentation framework, a residual network (ResNet-34) was introduced as the backbone, and weighted skip connections were used to enhance edge recognition capabilities, resulting in the CaneUNet-W model. Model performance was evaluated through regional cross-validation. Results showed that the model achieved average Intersection over Union (IoU), F1-score, and Kappa coefficient of 0.924, 0.960, and 0.912, respectively, for sugarcane fields identification, demonstrating high accuracy and generalization.The spatial distribution characteristics of the model's inference results were basically consistent with the visual interpretation trends of experts based on high-resolution imagery. The method presented in this paper can objectively reflect the remote sensing phenotypic variation of sugarcane canopy under drought stress, verifying its feasibility and effectiveness in intelligent identification and refined assessment of sugarcane drought conditions. However, due to the lack of synchronous ground-based measured data, future research will introduce physiological indicators such as soil moisture for quantitative calibration, thereby improving the disaster prevention and mitigation capabilities of sugarcane production.

Key words: sugarcane, low-altitude remote sensing, deep learning, semantic segmentation, U-Net