Informer–UNet: A Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Multi-Point Soil Moisture Prediction and Precision Irrigation in Winter Wheat

Abstract

Soil moisture prediction is essential for precision irrigation in water-limited agricultural systems. This study presents a deep learning-driven irrigation framework for winter wheat, integrating a novel Informer–UNet model with a Comprehensive Irrigation Index for adaptive water management. The Informer–UNet combines ProbSparse self-attention mechanisms with UNet’s multi-scale feature fusion, enabling simultaneous prediction of soil moisture at 27 monitoring points across three depths, 10, 30, and 50 cm, while quantifying prediction uncertainty through Monte Carlo Dropout. A Comprehensive Irrigation Index incorporating moisture deviation, spatial variance, and confidence interval width was developed, with weights optimized via genetic algorithm. Field experiments were conducted in Chengdu, China, over two winter wheat growing seasons. The Informer–UNet achieved superior prediction accuracy, R2 greater than 0.98, RMSE less than 0.65, compared to LSTM, Transformer, and standard Informer models, with the fastest convergence and lowest validation loss. The proposed DeepIndexIrr strategy maintained soil moisture within the target range, 55% to 75%, for over 81% of the irrigation period, reducing water consumption by 38.2% compared to fixed-threshold control and 19.2% compared to expert manual scheduling. These results demonstrate that integrating spatially distributed deep learning predictions with uncertainty-informed decision rules offers a promising approach for sustainable precision irrigation.

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