Abstract: Abstract: Nitrogen is a key plant nutrient and its deficiency or surplus could inhibit plant growth and reduce crop yield. Over the past decade, remote sensing has been increasingly used to diagnosis nitrogen deficiency in crop. Taking rice grown in cold region in northeast China as an example, this paper studies the relationship between nitrogen content in japonica rice and the difference between spectral reflectance based on data measured from field. This relationship was used to inversely estimate nitrogen deficiency in the rice based on hyperspectral images. In our analysis, the nitrogen content producing the highest yield was defined as standard nitrogen content and its associated spectral reflectance was defied as standard spectral reflectance. The difference between real nitrogen content and the standard nitrogen content, as well as the difference between the real spectral reflectance the standard spectral reflectance, were calculated respectively. The difference in spectral reflectance was dimensionally reduced using the discrete wavelet multi-scale decomposition, continuous projection method (successive projections algorithm, SPA) and vegetation index construction. The characteristic bands screened by SPA were 459、460、475、671、723、874 and 996 nm. Analysis showed that when the discrete wavelet multi-scale decomposition was used to reduce the dimension, the Sym8 wavelet mother function worked best when it was decomposed at the seventh layer. Comparing DVI, NDVI and RVI vegetation index found that the determination coefficient of the DVI index and nitrogen deficiency was significantly higher than that of NDVI and RVI index. The three indexes were used as input to the partial least squares (PLSR), the extreme learning machine (ELM) and genetic algorithm optimization extreme learning machine (GA-ELM). The GA-ELM model was most accurate with the R2 being 0.7062 for the training set and 0.7594 for the verification set; their associated RMSE was 0.5099mg/g and 0.4276mg/g respectively. The GA-ELM model based on the optimal vegetation index was least accurate, with the R2 for the training set and the verifying set being 0.6615 and 0.6509 respectively; their associated RMSE was 0.4415mg/g and 0.5312mg/g. Overall, GA-ELM improved stability and predictability of the model compared with PLSR and ELM. It can thus be used as a new method to detect nitrogen content in rice leaf, and has important implication in precision fertilization.