MA-UQNet: A multi-modal uncertainty quantification neural network for remote sensing-based wheat aboveground biomass estimation

Abstract

Accurate aboveground biomass estimation with quantified uncertainty is essential for precision agriculture, enabling risk-aware decision-making and strategic model improvement. Existing approaches predominantly provide point estimates without uncertainty quantification, limiting their operational utility for trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) deployment. This study presents a Multi-modal Attention-based Uncertainty Quantification Network (MA-UQNet), which achieves superior prediction accuracy (R 2 = 0.856) with well-calibrated uncertainty (97.18% coverage) for wheat aboveground biomass estimation through integrated multi-modal attention, growth stage-specific processing, and epistemic–aleatoric uncertainty decomposition. The framework integrates hyperspectral remote sensing with environmental variables via joint attention mechanisms that adapt to phenological variations. Model development employed a decade-spanning dataset (2012–2022, 1272 samples) collected under factorial combinations of nitrogen rates (0–270 kg/ha), irrigation levels (0–384 mm), and wheat cultivars across four growth stages. Temporal extrapolation validation using chronological partitioning (2012–2019 for training and 2020–2021 for testing) demonstrated robust generalization, substantially outperforming Random Forest (R 2 = 0.751, coverage = 76.61%) and nine representative baselines, including Bayesian Neural Networks (R 2 = 0.805, coverage = 38.31%). Uncertainty decomposition revealed epistemic uncertainty to be moderately dominant (53%) relative to aleatoric uncertainty (47%), indicating that strategic data collection offers greater potential for uncertainty reduction than improving measurement precision alone. These findings provide validated tools for uncertainty-aware biomass estimation in precision agriculture.

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