Multispectral Fluorescence Imaging for Fast Identification of Cold Stress in Pepper Plants

This paper investigated the feasibility of snapshot multispectral fluorescence imaging for nondestructive identification of cold stress in pepper plants. Fluorescence spectra were obtained by exciting the plant with a 405 nm ultraviolet LED. The plants were grown under three temperature conditions: 17 °C (control), 10 °C (moderate cold stress), and 5 °C (severe cold stress). Raw fluorescence spectra extracted from the demosaiced snapshot images were used as inputs for a deep-learning pipeline consisting of feature extraction, an encoder-decoder GRU, and a multilayer perceptron (MLP), and the results were compared with conventional machine learning classifiers, including linear discriminant analysis (LDA), quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), and a Gaussian support vector machine (G-SVM). Tukey's HSD test indicated that the proposed deep-learning model achieved the highest cross-validation accuracy and consistently produced superior classification metrics (accuracy of 85.7%, precision of 85.3%, recall of 85.3%, F1-score of 85.2). The trained model was further applied to hyperspectral cubes to generate classification maps; however, moderate misclassification was observed, consistent with the overall prediction performance.