Determination of Plant Developmental Stability in Plant Lighting with Hyperspectral Imaging

Abstract

The authors showed that a convenient, accurate and fast way of assessing the degree of influence of environmental factors on plants was needed to optimize photoculture. They emphasized the importance of non-destructive monitoring of crops physiological state of, for which they used phenomics technologies, for example, remote sensing using hyperspectral cameras.(Research purpose) To reveal the possibility of using hyperspectral imaging to determine the plant developmental stability.(Materials and methods) As a measure of the favorable impact of environmental factors on the growth and development of plants, their developmental stability was taken, numerically characterized by the fluctuating asymmetry value. The authors proposed to use vegetation indices determined from the leaf reflection spectra as a bilateral feature. The object of experimental research was juvenile cucumber plants. The studies were carried out in laboratory conditions. The spectral characteristics of cucumber leaves grown under different light quality of radiation were determined using a Specim IQ hyperspectral camera. Information on the spectral reflectances was extracted from the resulting data hypercube. As an example calculations were performed for Normalized Difference Vegetation Index.(Results and discussion) The authors revealed differences in the productivity indicators of plants grown under different light quality. They revealed a significant frequency of occurrence of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index asymmetry in two halves of the cucumber leaf surface. The fluctuating nature of this asymmetry was confirmed. They found that with a light quality providing a higher productivity of plants, lower values of fluctuating asymmetry were observed, which indicate greater stability of plant development.(Conclusions) The authors proposed a method for determining the plant developmental stability using a hyperspectral camera. The method was based on the assessment of the fluctuating asymmetry of vegetation indices calculated for points on the leaf surface, characterized by the same location conditions relative to the border of its left and right halves. A preliminary assessment of the possibility of determining the developmental stability by the results of phenotyping using the example of cucumber plants showed the feasibility of the method and its practical applicability.