Leaf marker spectra identification by hyperspectral image acquisition and vertex component analysis

To monitor biological systems, aside destructive testing which have been developed in chemistry and chromatography, hyperspectral image acquisition and processing exhibit the great advantage of being non-destructive. In this paper, a hyperspectral image acquisition setup is proposed, to get detailed information on the reflectance of leaves. We aim at giving information about the repartition of pigments on a leaf, by proposing a hyperspectral image acquisition setup, and adapting an algebraic method, vertex component analysis, which selects, among a set of input spectra, the marker spectra which best yield all input spectra by linear combination. A matrix inversion yields the contribution of the marker spectra for any spectrum. We acquired the image of leaves and estimated pigment concentrations with the help of a reflectance index.