Cluster-Based Knowledge Transfer Approach for Smart Farming; 2020

Paweena Suebsombut, College of Arts, Media and Techology, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand paweena.sue@mfu.ac.th

Aicha Sekhari Seklouli, Decision and Information Systems for Production systems (DISP) Laboratory, IUT Lumiere – University Lyon 2 FRANCE

Pradorn Sureephong, College of Arts, Media and Techology, Chiang Mai University Chiang Mai, Thailand

Abdelaziz Bouras

 

Applied Sciences. Vol 11, no. 24(2021): p. 11820 

Soil Moisture, Smart Irrigation, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, LSTM Bidirectional LSTM 

 

Abstract

Water, an essential resource for crop production, is becoming increasingly scarce, while cropland continues to expand due to the world’s population growth. Proper irrigation scheduling has been shown to help farmers improve crop yield and quality, resulting in more sustainable water consumption. Soil Moisture (SM), which indicates the amount of water in the soil, is one of the most important crop irrigation parameters. In terms of water usage optimization and crop yield, estimating future soil moisture (forecasting) is an essentially valuable task for crop irrigation. As a result, farmers can base crop irrigation decisions on this parameter. Sensors can be used to estimate this value in real time, which may assist farmers in deciding whether or not to irrigate. The soil moisture value provided by the sensors, on the other hand, is instantaneous and cannot be used to directly compute irrigation parameters such as the best timing or the required water quantity to irrigate. The soil moisture value can, in fact, vary greatly depending on factors such as humidity, weather, and time. Using machine learning methods, these parameters can be used to predict soil moisture levels in the near future. This paper proposes a new Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM)-based model to forecast soil moisture values in the future based on parameters collected from various sensors as a potential solution. To train and validate this model, a real-world dataset containing a set of parameters related to weather forecasting, soil moisture, and other related parameters was collected using smart sensors installed in a greenhouse in Chiang Mai province, Thailand. Preliminary results show that our LSTM-based model performs well in predicting soil moisture with a 0.72% RMSE error and a 0.52% cross-validation error (LSTM), and our Bi-LSTM model with a 0.76% RMSE error and a 0.57% cross-validation error. In the future, we aim to test and validate this model on other similar datasets.

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