New publication - Hyperspectral imaging for high-throughput vitality monitoring in ornamental plant production

Monitoring the vitality status of plants is crucial for heather farmers to produce high quality ornamentals. Detection of stressed and/or diseased plants can be challenging and requires highly experienced experts. Monitoring tools like hyperspectral sensors might be able to optimize the observation processes in heather production by supporting farmers with additional information about the vitality status of their plants. Hyperspectral sensors are able to detect more wavelengths compared to human eyes. Here we provide an open-access study to show how we developed our adjustable setup to measure thousands of heather plants over 14 weeks. In addition, we evaluated the captured hyperspectral data, used a machine-learning approach to classify test data, and identified the most important wavelengths for the classification process.

Reflectance in the green (519 nm – 575 nm) and red-edge (712 nm – 718 nm) region of the spectrum was identified as most important for classifying plants as healthy or stressed. We transferred a trained Partial Least Squares regression model to independent test data correctly classifying 98.1% of the plants. We identified challenges in data evaluation, point out promising evaluation approaches, and make our dataset, code, and PLSR model available to facilitate further research.

Our publication ‘Hyperspectral imaging for high-throughput vitality monitoring in ornamental plant production’ by Ruett et al. 2022 is accessible using the following link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scienta.2021.110546

This work represents a collaboration from the Horticultural Sciences Department of the University of Bonn (Dr. Hannah Jaenicke, Prof. Dr. Eike Luedeling, Dr. Cory Whitney, Dr. Jan Ellenberger, and Dr. Marius Ruett), Forschungszentrum Jülich (Laura Verena Junker-Frohn, Uwe Rascher, and Bastian Siegmann), and Landwirtschaftskammer NRW (Peter Tiede-Arlt). Many thanks to Stiftung Zukunft NRW for their support. A special thanks goes to the heather farmers for their contribution to this work.
Ruett, M., Junker-Frohn, L.V., Siegmann, B., Ellenberger, J., Jaenicke, H., Whitney, C., Luedeling, E., Tiede-Arlt, P., Rascher, U., 2022. Hyperspectral imaging for high-throughput vitality monitoring in ornamental plant production. Scientia Horticulturae 291, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scienta.2021.110546