A CNN model for early detection of pepper Phytophthora blight using multispectral imaging, integrating spectral and textural information.

Background: Pepper Phytophthora blight is a devastating disease during the growth process of peppers, significantly affecting their yield and quality. Accurate, rapid, and non-destructive early detection of pepper Phytophthora blight is of great importance for pepper production management. This study investigated the possibility of using multispectral imaging combined with machine learning to detect Phytophthora blight in peppers. Peppers were divided into two groups: one group was inoculated with Phytophthora blight, and the other was left untreated as a control. Multispectral images were collected at 0-h samples before inoculation and at 48, 60, 72, and 84 h after inoculation. The supporting software of the multispectral imaging system was used to extract spectral features from 19 wavelengths, and textural features were extracted using a gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) and a local binary pattern (LBP). The principal component analysis (PCA), successive projection algorithm (SPA), and genetic algorithm (GA) were used for feature selection from the extracted spectral and textural features. Two classification models were established based on effective single spectral features and significant spectral textural fusion features: a partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS_DA) and one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN). A two-dimensional convolutional neural network (2D-CNN) was constructed based on five principal component (PC) coefficients extracted from the spectral data using PCA, weighted, and summed with 19-channel multispectral images to create new PC images.

Results: The results indicated that the models using PCA for feature selection exhibit relatively stable classification performance. The accuracy of PLS-DA and 1D-CNN based on single spectral features is 82.6% and 83.3%, respectively, at the 48h mark. In contrast, the accuracy of PLS-DA and 1D-CNN based on spectral texture fusion reached 85.9% and 91.3%, respectively, at the same 48h mark. The accuracy of the 2D-CNN based on 5 PC images is 82%.

Conclusions: The research indicates that Phytophthora blight infection can be detected 48 h after inoculation (36 h before visible symptoms). This study provides an effective method for the early detection of Phytophthora blight in peppers.