Evaluating photosynthetic pigment contents of maize using UVE-PLS based on continuous wavelet transform.

•Photosynthetic pigments reflect the status of crop plant physiology.•Hyperspectral reflectance can be used for assessing photosynthetic pigments.•The number of variables was reduced by half for CWT-UVE-PLS.•The calibration models have best R2 and the lowest RMSE.•The photosynthetic pigments can be accurately monitored with the CWT-UVE-PLS method.