Hyperspectral technology is a breakthrough technology in agriculture remote sensing which enables the dynamic and precise monitoring of crop types and crop growth. Hyperspectral remote sensing technology has been widely used in estimating the yield of crops, agricultural resources surveying, agricultural disaster monitoring, and precision agriculture [
1]. Plant quantitative remote sensing technology is widely used in a variety of applications by mining spectral information and setting up spectral retrieving model. For the estimation of crop yield, Nuarrsa et al. extracted a rice area with an overall accuracy of 87.91% using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), radar vegetation index (RVI), and soil-adjusted vegetation index (SAVI) from MODIS time series data [
2]. Tornosa et al. assessed the potential of different spectral indices for monitoring rice agricultural practices and hydroperiod dynamics by combining phenometrics and statistical time series approaches [
3]. Kang et al. developed spectral indices that can reduce the effects of varied canopy structure and growth stages for the estimation of leaf Chl [
4]. Fei et al. optimized the band combinations further, and identified the optimized central bands and suitable bandwidths of the three-band nitrogen planar domain index (NPDI) for estimating the aerial N uptake, N concentration, and above-ground biomass [
5]. Atherton et al. linked spectral measurements of fluorescence and the PRI to photosynthesis dynamics at the leaf scale and over short time-scales [
6]. Heli et al. found that the values of crop variables may not be accurately determined when they are based solely on the measurements of leaves, especially only the upper leaves, as the values varied greatly among the different vertical leaf and stem layers and the different modules, such as leaves, stems, and spikes [
7]. Qiang et al. proposed an iterative method which integrate MODIS, VEGETATION, and MISR data to improve the estimation of leaf area index (LAI) climatology [
8]. Mahlein et al. developed specific spectral disease indices (SDIs) for the detection of diseases in crops [
9]. Alicia et al. assessed AS1 and AS2 behavior over a cotton crop growing period, testing whether function-fitting procedures can be used to model MODIS AS1 and AS2 and NDVI time series and derive objective AS1 and AS2 phenological metrics that can be used to monitor cotton phenological stages [
10]. Veraverbeke et al. evaluated the discriminatory power of existing VIs and thermally-enhanced indices in burned land applications [
11]. Jochem et al. introduced an automated spectral band analysis tool (BAT) based on Gaussian process regression (GPR) for the spectral analysis of vegetation properties [
12]. Abderrazak et al. proposed a spatiotemporal monitoring method of soil salinization in the Tadla plain in Central Morocco using spectral indices derived from Thematic Mapper (TM) and Operational Land Imager (OLI) data [
13]. Ferner et al. tested whether spatio-temporal information on the quality (metabolizable energy content, ME) and quantity (green biomass, BM) of West African forage resources can be correlated to in situ-measured reflectance data [
14]. Oz et al. found informative spectral bands in three types of models—vegetation indices (VI), neural network (NN), and partial least squares (PLS) regression—for estimating leaf chlorophyll (Chl) and carotenoid (Car) contents of three unrelated tree species and to assess the accuracy of the models using a minimal number of bands [
15]. Jesús et al. proposed a two-step approach to realize simultaneous LAI mapping over green and senescent croplands [
16]. Dibyendu et al. demonstrated that total polyphenols of tea can be precisely estimated from a field spectroradiometer at the leaf level irrespective of age of the bushes and farming practices [
17].
With the aid of Internet technology, agricultural informatization and agricultural big data have become inevitable trends. In recent years, with the successive launch of hyperspectral satellites and the development of microhyperspectral imagers of UAVs, the applications of hyperspectral remote sensing has become widely available. However, on the other hand, the increase of data volume brings great challenges with respect to data transmission, analysis, and storage [
18]. Candes, Donoho, and Tao et al. proposed a new data acquisition and processing theory called compressive sensing (CS) [
19,
20,
21]. Compressive sensing samples data at far below the Nyquist sampling rate by constructing an uncorrelated observation matrix, and the original data is reconstructed by a reconstruction algorithm. It, thus, provides a new way for compressing and reconstructing data with large volume.
At present, many studies have been conducted on applying compressive sensing in processing high-dimensional data. Kang et al. [
22] proposed a method of distributed compressive sensing to grouping the video sequences efficiently by studying the correlation of the video sequences. Ly et al. [
23] pointed out that the hyperspectral data should be stochastically separated by spectral and spatial partitioning. Chen et al. [
24] proposed a sparse method for hyperspectral image target detection. Wang et al. proposed a pixel-based distributed compressive sensing [
25], which divides the hyperspectral data into endmember extraction and abundance estimation through a linear mixture model. However, all of these methods did not concern applications of compressive sensing in agriculture, but mainly focused on the spatial reconstruction.
To promote the application of hyperspectral remote sensing in agriculture, the compressive sensing method provides a new method for the compression and recovery of hyperspectral data. However, at present, the research of compressive sensing is mainly focused on the reconstruction of the spatial image, and the spectral dimension of the hyperspectral data needs to be concerned in information reconstruction. Hyperspectral images have spectral-spatial correlations. The compressive sensing of high-dimensional data using the autocorrelation nature of data to improve the data sparse representation, which is able to reduce the complexity and improve the accuracy of reconstruction. In this study, through the analysis of plant spectral characteristics, a distributed spectral adaptive grouping compressive sensing is proposed and verified.