Inversion study of soil organic matter content based on reflectance spectroscopy and the improved hybrid extreme learning machine.

[Display omitted] • A method for rapid and accurate detection of soil organic matter content. • The method is based on reflectance spectroscopy and machine learning. • Quality band combinations are obtained by spectral pre-processing methods. • Genetic strategy is introduced into the model to enhance its exploration capability. • We propose an improved hybrid extreme learning machine model. The continuous exploitation of mining resources and a number of other factors have led to serious soil pollution problems. Soil organic matter (SOM) can be used as an important measure of soil fertility and ecological environment quality in mining areas. The traditional method of measuring SOM content by chemical methods is costly and time-consuming, so it is important to develop a rapid, accurate and economical method to measure SOM content in reclaimed mines for the ecological restoration and the evaluation of the ecological reclamation effect of mines. In this paper, the visible-near infrared spectral data of soil were obtained using an open pit mine as the study area. The three pre-processing methods of multiple scattering correction, continuous removal and Savitzky-Golay smoothing were compared. Then the two-band ratio spectral index RI was constructed to obtain the sensitive band combinations. To address the problem that the HHO-TELM hybrid model tended to converge prematurely, the GHO-TELM model was proposed in this paper. GHO-TELM introduced a gene learning strategy in HHO-TELM. The crossover, mutation and selection mechanisms were used to cultivate high-quality examples, enhance the quality of individuals and prevent premature convergence of the model. GHO-TELM was compared with several machine learning models. The experimental results showed that GHO-TELM obtained the best performance indexes, with correlation coefficient (r) of 0.9586, and relative percentage deviation (RPD) of 3.0823, indicating that the model had a good prediction effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]