Hyperspectral imaging sensors are promising tools for monitoring crop plants or vegetation in different environments. Information on physiology, architecture or biochemistry of plants can be assessed non-invasively and on different scales. For instance, hyperspectral sensors are implemented for stress detection in plant phenotyping processes or in precision agriculture. Up to date, a variety of non-imaging and imaging hyperspectral sensors is available. The measuring process and the handling of most of these sensors is rather complex. Thus, during the last years the demand for sensors with easy user operability arose. The present study introduces the novel hyperspectral camera Specim IQ from Specim (Oulu, Finland). The Specim IQ is a handheld push broom system with integrated operating system and controls. Basic data handling and data analysis processes, such as pre-processing and classification routines are implemented within the camera software. This study provides an introduction into the measurement pipeline of the Specim IQ as well as a radiometric performance comparison with a well-established hyperspectral imager. Case studies for the detection of powdery mildew on barley at the canopy scale and the spectral characterization of Arabidopsis thaliana mutants grown under stressed and non-stressed conditions are presented.

This work established a hyperspectral library of important foliar diseases of wheat induced by different fungal pathogens, representing a time series from infection to symptom appearance for the purpose of detecting spectral changes. The data were generated under controlled conditions at the leaf scale. The transition from healthy to diseased leaf tissue was assessed, and spectral shifts were identified and used in combination with histological investigations to define developmental stages in pathogenesis for each disease. The spectral signatures of each plant disease that indicate a specific developmental stage during pathogenesis, defined as turning points, were combined into a spectral library. Machine learning analysis methods were applied and compared to test the potential of this library to detect and quantify foliar diseases in hyperspectral images. All evaluated classifiers had high accuracy (≤99%) for the detection and identification of both biotrophic and necrotrophic fungi. The potential of applying spectral analysis methods in combination with a spectral library for the detection and identification of plant diseases is demonstrated. Further evaluation and development of these algorithms should contribute to a robust detection and identification system for plant diseases at different developmental stages and the promotion and development of site-specific management techniques for plant diseases under field conditions.

The characterization of plant disease symptoms by hyperspectral imaging is often limited by the missing ability to investigate early, still invisible states. Automatically tracing the symptom position on the leaf back in time could be a promising approach to overcome this limitation. Therefore we present a method to spatially reference time series of close range hyperspectral images. Based on reference points, a robust method is presented to derive a suitable transformation model for each observation within a time series experiment. A non-linear 2D polynomial transformation model has been selected to cope with the specific structure and growth processes of wheat leaves. The potential of the method is outlined by an improved labeling procedure for very early symptoms and by extracting spectral characteristics of single symptoms represented by Vegetation Indices over time. The characteristics are extracted for brown rust and septoria tritici blotch on wheat, based on time series observations using a VISNIR (400–1000 nm) hyperspectral camera.