Marginal contribution spectral fusion network for remote hyperspectral soil organic matter estimation

Abstract

Soil organic matter (SOM) is a fundamental indicator of soil health and a major component of the global carbon cycle; its accurate quantification is essential for sustainable agriculture. Conventional chemical assays yield only point-based soil measurements and miss the spatial distribution of soil elements; airborne hyperspectral remote sensing has emerged as a promising approach for the quantitative measurement and characterization of SOM. Inversion models translate hyperspectral data into quantitative SOM estimates. However, existing models rely solely on a single preprocessing pathway, limiting their ability to fully exploit available spectral information. We address these limitations by developing a marginal contribution-driven spectral fusion network (MC-SFNet) that conducts feature-level fusion of heterogeneous preprocessing outputs within a physics-guided deep architecture. Moreover, the combination of data-driven fusion and the Kubelka–Munk (KM) model yields more physically interpretable spectral features, advancing beyond prior purely data-driven methods. We validated MC-SFNet on a self-constructed remote sensing, high-throughput hyperspectral dataset comprising 200 black soil samples from Northeastern China (400–1000 nm, 256 bands). Experimental results show that our network reduces the RMSE by 10.7% relative to the prevailing generalized hyperspectral soil-inversion model. The proposed method provides a novel preprocessing pathway for forthcoming airborne high-throughput hyperspectral missions to extract soil-specific spectral information more effectively and further enhance large-scale SOM retrieval accuracy.