精准农业中的土壤湿度估计：一种知识蒸馏方法
Soil Moisture Estimation in Precision Agriculture: A Knowledge Distillation Approach
Mohammed Rakib, Vrinda Nagula, Arunkumar Bagavathi
AI 速览：提出SMD知识蒸馏框架，利用单模态教师模型增强多模态土壤湿度估计，并比较土壤与作物图像的视觉线索效果。
Accurate soil moisture estimation is critical for precision agriculture, influencing irrigation, fertilization, and harvesting strategies. Traditional methods primarily rely on meteorological and soil property data, while recent approaches incorporate visual modalities such as aerial and geospatial imagery. However, these high-resolution images are expensive and computationally demanding to analyze. In this work, we propose Soil Moisture Distillation (SMD), a Knowledge Distillation (KD)-based multimodal learning framework that leverages unimodal teachers to enhance multimodal soil moisture estimation. SMD surpasses not only traditional multimodal fusion techniques, including MIS-ME, but also outperforms unimodal models, demonstrating the benefits of guided unimodal knowledge transfer. Additionally, we conduct a comparative analysis of soil patches and crop images, showing that crop images provide superior visual cues, leading to improved prediction accuracy. SMD achieves a 2% improvement in MAPE for soil patches and 1.2% for crops over state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of leveraging both meteorological and visual data through knowledge distillation for enhanced soil moisture forecasting.