UAV-Derived Multispectral Datasets and Index-Guided Segmentation for Maize Water Stress and Common Rust Detection Under Real Field Conditions

Abstract

The segmentation model achieved Mean IoU values of 0.7723 for Water Stress 2025, 0.9164 for Common Rust 2025, and 0.9531 on the benchmark dataset. The classifier achieved 99.54% accuracy for the five-class task; however, the improvement over the strongest baselines and the RGB + multispectral configuration was limited. Therefore, the classification component is not presented as a substantially superior classification-only model. Instead, it is interpreted as an exploratory multimodal analysis that quantifies the contribution and limitation of RGB, multispectral, Wavelet, and GLCM branches under the adopted UAV dataset protocol. For classification-only deployment, simpler alternatives such as DenseNet201 or the RGB + multispectral configuration may be more practical because they provide comparable accuracy with lower architectural or preprocessing complexity. Ablation, modality-controlled, and 21-run stability experiments showed reproducible segmentation results and clarified the behavior of the classification branches. RGB and multispectral branches mainly provided the peak classification accuracy, whereas Wavelet and GLCM branches mainly affected offline convergence rather than final accuracy. RGB, NDVI, and NDRE visualizations were also added for qualitative support. Since direct physiological ground measurements were not available for all samples, the masks are interpreted as adaptive index-guided labels rather than direct physiological ground truth. Overall, the main evidence of practical benefit is associated with UAV-based dataset construction, adaptive index-guided segmentation, and field-scale stress/disease mapping, while the classification experiments should be interpreted as modality-contribution and convergence analyses rather than proof of a practically superior complex classifier.

Plant phenotyping relevance

UAVマルチスペクトル画像によるトウモロコシの水ストレス・病害状態のセグメンテーション、データセット構築、再現性評価が研究の中心であり、植物表現型の取得・抽出手法として実質的です。

Code and data availability

The supplied blocks describe two original UAV multispectral datasets (Water Stress 2025, Common Rust 2025) and a segmentation/classification workflow, but contain no public deposit, repository, or availability statement for the datasets, images, masks, code, or trained models. No authors' public URL for a paper-qualify

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