Abstract
Estimating the nutritional status of rice leaves is crucial for efficient nutrient management and yield enhancement. Traditional wet lab analyses are time-consuming and labor-intensive. This study presents a novel deep learning-based approach utilizing multispectral images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to estimate macro/micro nutrients in rice leaves. The proposed framework integrates a differentiable neural search technique using polynomial function approximators and an adaptive activation mechanism, which not only provides improved predictive performance but also deals efficiently with limited training data. The model performance is evaluated across different treatments and crop growth stages using mean absolute error (MAE) and [Formula: see text] values. Experiments were conducted at the Punjab Agricultural University. The results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves MAE values in the range of 0.06-0.11 for SAS-I and 0.06-0.16 for SAS-II across eleven leaf macro/micro nutrients. To further evaluate the reliability of the predicted nutrients beyond the prediction error analysis, uncertainty estimation of nutrients is also performed. Comparative analysis shows that the proposed framework outperforms conventional deep learning baselines and machine learning methods in terms of accuracy and robustness. Furthermore, the t-SNE visualization of learned feature representations effectively clusters similar nutrient values while separating dissimilar ones. The robustness of the proposed framework is further validated through ablation studies, treatment-wise and plot-wise cross-validation, highlighting the contribution of individual components and their performance under varying field conditions. These findings highlight the proposed NAS-based framework for precise and reliable nutrient assessment in precision agriculture.