Application of Fractional Differential Calculation in Pretreatment of Saline Soil Hyperspectral Reflectance Data

• Main Authors: Anhong Tian, Junsan Zhao, Heigang Xiong, Shu Gan, Chengbiao Fu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hindawi Limited 2018-01-01
• Series: Journal of Sensors
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2018/8017614

Pretreatment of spectrum data is a necessary and effective method for improving the accuracy of hyperspectral model building. Traditional differential calculation pretreatment only considers the integer-order differential, such as the 1st order and 2nd order, and overlooks important spectrum information located at fractional order. Since fractional differential (FD) has rarely been applied to spectrum field measurement, there are few reports on the spectrum features of saline soils under different degrees of human interference. We used FD to analyze field spectrum data of saline soil collected from Xinjiang’s Fukang City. Order interval of 0.2 was adopted to divide 0–2 orders into 11-order differentials. MATLAB programming was used to convert the raw spectral reflectance and its four common types of mathematics and to conduct FD calculation. Spectrum data for area A (no human interference area) and area B (human interference area) was separately processed. From the statistical analysis of soil salinization characteristics, the salinization degree and type for area B were more diverse and complicated than area A. MATLAB simulation results showed that FD calculation could depict the minute differences between different FD order spectra under different human interference areas. The overall differential value trend appeared to move towards 0 reflectance value. After differential processing, the trend of bands that passed the 0.05 significance test of correlation coefficient (CC) showed an increase first then decrease later. The maximum CC absolute value for five spectrum transformations all appeared in the fractional order. FD calculation could significantly increase the correlation between spectral reflectance and soil salt content both for full-band and single-band spectra. Results of this study can serve as a reference for the application of FD in field hyperspectral monitoring of soil salinization for different human interference areas.