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In this paper, we propose to estimate the moisture of vineyard soils from digital photography using machine learning methods. Two nonlinear regression models are implemented: a multilayer perceptron (MLP) and a support vector regression (SVR). Pixels coded with RGB colour model extracted from soil digital images along with the associated known soil moisture levels are used to train both models in order to predict moisture content from newly acquired images. The study is conducted on samples of six soil types collected from Chateau Kefraya terroirs in Lebanon. Both methods succeeded in forecasting moisture giving high correlation values between the measured moisture and the predicted moisture when tested on unknown data. However, the method based on SVR outperformed the one based on MLP yielding Pearson correlation coefficient values ranging from 0.89 to 0.99. Moreover, it is a simple and noninvasive method that can be adopted easily to detect vineyards soil moisture.

This paper proposes a novel approach for living and missing vine identification and vine characterization in goblet-trained vine plots using aerial images. Given the periodic structure of goblet vineyards, the RGB color coded parcel image is analyzed using proper processing techniques in order to determine the locations of living and missing vines. Vine characterization is achieved by implementing the marker-controlled watershed transform where the centers of the living vines serve as object markers. As a result, a precise mortality rate is calculated for each parcel. Moreover, all vines, even the overlapping ones, are fully recognized providing information about their size, shape, and green color intensity. The presented approach is fully automated and yields accuracy values exceeding 95% when the obtained results are assessed with ground-truth data. This unsupervised and automated approach can be applied to any type of plots presenting similar spatial patterns requiring only the image as input.

The Self-Organizing Maps have been widely used as multidimensional unsupervised classifiers. The aim of this paper is to develop a self-organizing map for interval data. Due to the increasing use of such data in Data Mining, many clustering methods for interval data have been proposed this last decade. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to train the self-organizing map for interval data. We use an extension of the Euclidian distance to compare two vectors of intervals. In order to show the usefulness of our approach, we apply the proposed algorithm on real interval data issued from meteorological stations in China.