Automatic detection of Flavescense Dorée grapevine disease in hyperspectral images using machine learning

Abstract

The technological revolution that we have been witnessing recently has allowed components miniaturization and made electronic components accessible. Hyperspectral sensors benefited from these advances and could be mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles, which was unthinkable until recently. This fact significantly increased the applications of hyperspectral data, namely in agriculture, especially in the detection of diseases at an early stage. The vineyard is one of the agricultural sectors that has the most to gain from the use of this type of data, both by the economic value and by the number of diseases the plants are exposed to. The Flavescense dorée is a disease that attacks vineyards and may conduct to a significant loss. Nowadays, the detection of this disease is based on the visual identification of symptoms performed by experts who cover the entire area. However, this work remains tedious and relies only on the human eye, which is a problem since sometimes healthy plants are torn out, while diseased ones are left. If the experts think they have found symptoms, they take samples to send to the laboratory for further analysis. If the test is positive, then the whole vine is uprooted, to limit the spread of the disease. In this context, the use of hyperspectral data will allow the development of new disease detection methods. However, it will be necessary to reduce the volume of data used to make them usable by conventional resources. Fortunately, the advent of machine learning techniques empowered the development of systems that allow better decisions to be made, and consequently save time and money. In this article, a machine learning approach, which is based on an Autoencoder to automatically detect wine disease, is proposed.