Estimation of Potato Growth Parameters Under Limited Field Data Availability by Integrating Few-Shot Learning and Multi-Task Learning

Sen Yang, Quan Feng (), Faxu Guo and Wenwei Zhou
Additional contact information
Sen Yang: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Gansu Agricultural University, Lanzhou 730070, China
Quan Feng: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Gansu Agricultural University, Lanzhou 730070, China
Faxu Guo: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Gansu Agricultural University, Lanzhou 730070, China
Wenwei Zhou: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Gansu Agricultural University, Lanzhou 730070, China

Agriculture, 2025, vol. 15, issue 15, 1-27

Abstract: Leaf chlorophyll content (LCC), leaf area index (LAI), and above-ground biomass (AGB) are important growth parameters for characterizing potato growth and predicting yield. While deep learning has demonstrated remarkable advancements in estimating crop growth parameters, the limited availability of field data often compromises model accuracy and generalizability, impeding large-scale regional applications. This study proposes a novel deep learning model that integrates multi-task learning and few-shot learning to address the challenge of low data in growth parameter prediction. Two multi-task learning architectures, MTL-DCNN and MTL-MMOE, were designed based on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) and multi-gate mixture-of-experts (MMOE) for the simultaneous estimation of LCC, LAI, and AGB from Sentinel-2 imagery. Building on this, a few-shot learning framework for growth prediction (FSLGP) was developed by integrating simulated spectral generation, model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML), and meta-transfer learning strategies, enabling accurate prediction of multiple growth parameters under limited data availability. The results demonstrated that the incorporation of calibrated simulated spectral data significantly improved the estimation accuracy of LCC, LAI, and AGB (R 2 = 0.62~0.73). Under scenarios with limited field measurement data, the multi-task deep learning model based on few-shot learning outperformed traditional mixed inversion methods in predicting potato growth parameters (R 2 = 0.69~0.73; rRMSE = 16.68%~28.13%). Among the two architectures, the MTL-MMOE model exhibited superior stability and robustness in multi-task learning. Independent spatiotemporal validation further confirmed the potential of MTL-MMOE in estimating LAI and AGB across different years and locations (R 2 = 0.37~0.52). These results collectively demonstrated that the proposed FSLGP framework could achieve reliable estimation of crop growth parameters using only a very limited number of in-field samples (approximately 80 samples). This study can provide a valuable technical reference for monitoring and predicting growth parameters in other crops.

Keywords: potato; growth parameter prediction; multi-task learning; few-shot learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/15/15/1638/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/15/15/1638/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jagris:v:15:y:2025:i:15:p:1638-:d:1712506

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture is currently edited by Ms. Leda Xuan

More articles in Agriculture from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().