The examination and modeling of moisture content effect of banana leaves on dielectric constant for remote sensing

Remote sensing technology is useful for detecting agricultural and fruit regions. In this way, the world map can be determined in terms of the vegetation canopy. Contrary to this case, the vegetation canopies can also be used in areas such as intelligence and military regions that are required to be hidden and invisible. The use of microwave remote sensing technology is more sensitive to radiation than other methods, so it allows us to have knowledge about the volumetric information of the target object. However, this method is based on obtaining the dielectric properties of the samples. The aim of this paper is to examine the effect of the moisture content on relative dielectric constant and dielectric loss of banana leaves at X-band as a novelty. In this study, transmission line technique is used to measure dielectric properties of the samples (banana leaves) in 8.2 to 12.4 GHz. The initial natural moisture content of the fresh banana leaves before drying is calculated to be approximately 82%. The moisture content of the banana leaves is dried from about 82% to 40%. As a result, the relative dielectric constant of it decreases with increasing frequency. In addition, increased moisture content increases both real and imaginary parts of dielectric constant. Correspondingly, unlike literature, a model that calculates the relative dielectric constant and dielectric loss value of the banana leaves is obtained. Root mean square error (RMSE) and R-squared (R-2) are calculated to see regression performance of the proposed model.