A hyperspectral plant health monitoring system for space crop production

Abstract

Compact and automated sensing systems are needed to monitor plant health for NASA's controlled-environment space crop production. A new hyperspectral system was designed for early detection of plant stresses using both reflectance and fluorescence imaging in visible and near-infrared (VNIR) wavelength range (400-1000 nm). The prototype system mainly includes two LED line lights providing VNIR broadband and UV-A (365 nm) light for reflectance and fluorescence measurement, respectively, a line-scan hyperspectral camera, and a linear motorized stage with a travel range of 80 cm. In an overhead sensor-to-sample arrangement, the stage translates the lights and camera over the plants to acquire reflectance and fluorescence images in sequence during one cycle of line-scan imaging. System software was developed using LabVIEW to realize hardware parameterization, data transfer, and automated imaging functions. The imaging unit was installed in a plant growth chamber at NASA Kennedy Space Center for health monitoring studies for pick-and-eat salad crops. A preliminary experiment was conducted to detect plant drought stress for twelve Dragoon lettuce samples, of which half were well-watered and half were under-watered while growing. A machine learning method using an optimized discriminant classifier based on VNIR reflectance spectra generated classification accuracies over 90% for the first four days of the stress treatment, showing great potential for early detection of the drought stress on lettuce leaves before any visible symptoms and size differences were evident. The system is promising to provide useful information for optimization of growth environment and early mitigation of stresses in space crop production.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物の健康状態・乾燥ストレスを推定するハイパースペクトル画像計測システムを設計・実装し、分類性能を予備検証しており、フェノタイピング手法が研究の中心です。

Code and data availability

The supplied blocks contain no public phenotype datasets, images, author code, or model checkpoints for this paper. MATLAB/LabVIEW programs are described as 'in-house' with no availability statement or URL. The only allowed URL (https://hdl.handle.net/2346/84471) appears solely as a citation link for prior work (Monje

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