doi: 10.18178/ijesd.2026.17.1.1563
High-throughput Mapping of Leaf Pigment Content from Multispectral Data
Anastasia A. Zolotukhina*
,
Anastasia V. Guryleva ,
Sergey S. Ladan ,
Oksana A. Gusarova ,
Alexander S. Machikhin
- Acousto-Optic Spectroscopy Lab, Scientific and Technological Center of Unique Instrumentation of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
- Manuscript receivedMay 30, 2025
- revisedJuly 25, 2025
- acceptedSeptember 29, 2025
- publishedJanuary 19, 2026
Abstract
Accurate and timely assessment of thephysiological status of plants is crucial for resource optimizationand minimizing environmental impact in ecological monitoringand agriculture. This study introduces a novel technique formapping pigment concentrations in plant leaves usingmultispectral imaging. The key innovation of the proposedapproach is a multispectral camera equipped withreconfigurable spectral filters, enabling application-specificdata acquisition. Combined with a data processing protocol, thesystem achieves high measurement accuracy of leaf pigmentcontent even with limited spectral channels. The techniqueincludes camera calibration, spatiospectral correction, spectralindex selection, and nonlinear regression to develop empiricalmodels for estimating chlorophyll concentration. Validationexperiments on proximal sensing of lettuce (Lactuca sativa)demonstrated that the ratio of Modified Chlorophyll AbsorptionRatio Index to Optimized Soil Adjusted Vegetation Indexachieved the best performance, with an R² of 0.81, an RMSE of0.3 mg/L, and relative error of less than 20%. Limitationsinclude residual shading and interpolation artifacts, whichsuggest opportunities for further improvement. The findingshighlight high potential of this technique for noninvasive andhigh-throughput monitoring of plant health in both ecologicaland agricultural contexts.
Keywords
- precision agriculture
- remote sensing
- pigment content mapping
- spectral indices
- multispectral imaging
How to Cite
Anastasia A. Zolotukhina, Anastasia V. Guryleva, Sergey S. Ladan, Oksana A. Gusarova, and Alexander S. Machikhin, "High-throughput Mapping of Leaf Pigment Content from Multispectral Data," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 48-55, 2026. https://doi.org/10.18178/ijesd.2026.17.1.1563
Copyright & License
Copyright © 2026 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).