Total information content as an index of soil moisture

Accurate estimation of soil moisture through remote sensing technique has been a challenge till date. In optical and thermal remote sensing, there is no index developed to detect the changes in soil moisture levels. In microwave region, soil roughness and other target parameters equally affect the technique for soil moisture estimation. Therefore, a computational technique in C language based on Shannon’s Information Theory (Shannon, 1948) has been developed to calculate total information content from multispectral radiometer data. The total information content is a compressed single value, which quantifies the information content of soil spectral reflectance in the electromagnetic spectrum range (400–1100 nm) under study. This technique was tested over a wide range of soil moisture levels. The study revealed that as compared to other techniques total information content index is very sensitive to change in moisture content of soil. This technique could not only quantify the soil moisture content in optical and near infra red region, but also led to a simplified one dimensional separability and clustering analysis.