Fast Detection of <i>Sclerotinia Sclerotiorum</i> on Oilseed Rape Leaves Using Low-Altitude Remote Sensing Technology

<i>Sclerotinia sclerotiorum</i>, one of the major diseases infecting oilseed rape leaves, has seriously affected crop yield and quality. In this study, an indoor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) low-altitude remote sensing simulation platform was built for disease detection. Thermal, multis...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Feng Cao, Fei Liu, Han Guo, Wenwen Kong, Chu Zhang, Yong He
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2018-12-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/18/12/4464
Description
Summary:<i>Sclerotinia sclerotiorum</i>, one of the major diseases infecting oilseed rape leaves, has seriously affected crop yield and quality. In this study, an indoor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) low-altitude remote sensing simulation platform was built for disease detection. Thermal, multispectral and RGB images were acquired before and after being artificially inoculated with <i>Sclerotinia sclerotiorum</i> on oilseed rape leaves. New image registration and fusion methods based on scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) were presented to construct a fused database using multi-model images. The changes of temperature distribution in different sections of infected areas were analyzed by processing thermal images, the maximum temperature difference (MTD) on a single leaf reached 1.7 degrees Celsius 24 h after infection. Four machine learning models were established using thermal images and fused images respectively, including support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and na&#239;ve Bayes (NB). The results demonstrated that the classification accuracy was improved by 11.3% after image fusion, and the SVM model obtained a classification accuracy of 90.0% on the task of classifying disease severity. The overall results indicated the UAV low-altitude remote sensing simulation platform equipped with multi-sensors could be used to early detect <i>Sclerotinia sclerotiorum</i> on oilseed rape leaves.
ISSN:1424-8220