A Microwave Imaging System for Soil Moisture Estimation in Subsurface Drip Irrigation

The microwave imaging system (MIS) stands out among prominent imaging tools for capturing images of concealed obstacles. Leveraging its capability to penetrate through heterogeneous environments, the MIS has been widely used for subsurface imaging. Monitoring subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) as an efficient procedure in agricultural irrigation is essential to maintain the required moisture percentage for plant growth which is a novel MIS application. In this research, we implement a laboratory-scale MIS for SDI, reflecting real-world conditions to evaluate leakage localization and quantification in a heterogeneous area. We extract a model to quantify the moisture content by exploiting an imaging approach that could be used in a scheduled SDI. We employ the subspace information of images formed by back-projection (BP) and Born approximation algorithms (BAAs) for model parameterization and estimate the model parameters using a statistical curve-fitting technique. We then compare the performance of these imaging techniques in the presence of environmental clutter such as plant roots and pebbles. The proposed approach can well contribute to efficient mechanistic subsurface irrigation for which the local moisture around the root is obtained noninvasively and remotely with less than 20% estimation error.