Identification of Corn Seeds with Different Freezing Damage Degree Based on Hyperspectral Reflectance Imaging and Deep Learning Method

Abstract

Seed freezing damage is an agricultural disaster, which has a great impact on seed quality assurance. The feasibility of combining hyperspectral imaging with deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) to classify different freeze-damaged corn seeds was studied in this paper. At first, the hyperspectral images of corn seeds subjected to five different freezing temperatures at 400–1000 nm were acquired, and then the average spectra were extracted from the region of embryo hyperspectral images over the wavelength range of 450–979 nm. Next, four models (K nearest neighbors (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), extreme learning machine (ELM), and DCNN) were developed for five-category (5 frozen conditions) and four-category (“no freezing,” “slight freezing,” “moderate freezing,” and “severe freezing”) classifications, and the values of the evaluation indexes (accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and precision) were calculated for comparison. The results show that DCNN model had the most satisfactory result with accuracy rates of 100% (training set), 96.9% (validation set), and 97.5% (testing set) for five-category classification, with accuracy rates of 100% (training, validation, and testing set) for four-category classification, and DCNN model also had the best performance in the evaluation indexes. At last, the visual classification map was generated according to the results of DCNN. It shows that hyperspectral imaging and DCNN can provide a novel method to detect the freezing damage of corn seeds quickly and inexpensively.