 The highest quality green tea is cultivated using shading treatments in Japan, but shading can lead to early mortalities of tea due to excessive environmental stress. An in situ method to monitor photosynthetic pigments is useful for agricultural management, and KELM had the highest performance among for supervised learning models for estimating chlorophyll A, B and carotenoid contents with a root mean square error of 1.95 plus or minus 0.36 gcm2, 1.08 plus or minus 0.11 gcm2 and 0.68 plus or minus 0.10 gcm2, respectively. This article was authored by Ray Sonobi, Yuta Miura, Tomahito Sono, and others.