Classification of healthy and diseased wheat heads in a rapid and non-destructive manner for the early diagnosis of Fusarium head blight disease research is difficult. Our work applies a deep neural network classification algorithm to the pixels of hyperspectral image to accurately discern the disease area. The spectra of hyperspectral image pixels in a manually selected region of interest are preprocessed via mean removal to eliminate interference, due to the time interval and the environment. The generalization of the classification model is considered, and two improvements are made to the model framework. First, the pixel spectra data are reshaped into a two-dimensional data structure for the input layer of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). After training two types of CNNs, the assessment shows that a two-dimensional CNN model is more efficient than a one-dimensional CNN. Second, a hybrid neural network with a convolutional layer and bidirectional recurrent layer is reconstructed to improve the generalization of the model. When considering the characteristics of the dataset and models, the confusion matrices that are based on the testing dataset indicate that the classification model is effective for background and disease classification of hyperspectral image pixels. The results of the model show that the two-dimensional convolutional bidirectional gated recurrent unit neural network (2D-CNN-BidGRU) has an F1 score and accuracy of 0.75 and 0.743, respectively, for the total testing dataset. A comparison of all the models shows that the hybrid neural network of 2D-CNN-BidGRU is the best at preventing over-fitting and optimize the generalization. Our results illustrate that the hybrid structure deep neural network is an excellent classification algorithm for healthy and Fusarium head blight diseased classification in the field of hyperspectral imagery.

The application of visible near-infrared (VIS-NIR) analysis technology to quantify the nutrients in soil has been widely recognized. It is important to improve the performance of regression models that can predict the soil-available potassium concentration. This study collected soil samples from southern Anhui, China, and concentrated on the modelling methods by using 29 pretreatment methods. The results show that a combination of three methods, Savitzky–Golay, standard normal variate, and dislodge tendency, exhibited better stability than others because it was the most capable of achieving levels A and B of the ratio of performance of deviation. The boosting algorithms that form an ensemble of multiple weak predictors exhibited better performance than partial least square (PLS) regression and support vector regression (SVR) for the prediction of soil-available potassium. These regression models could be employed to precisely predict the soil-available potassium concentration.

Precise pear detection and recognition is an essential step toward modernizing orchard management. However, due to the ubiquitous occlusion in orchards and various locations of image acquisition, the pears in the acquired images may be quite small and occluded, causing high false detection and object loss rate. In this paper, a multi-scale collaborative perception network YOLOv5s-FP (Fusion and Perception) was proposed for pear detection, which coupled local and global features. Specifically, a pear dataset with a high proportion of small and occluded pears was proposed, comprising 3680 images acquired with cameras mounted on a ground tripod and a UAV platform. The cross-stage partial (CSP) module was optimized to extract global features through a transformer encoder, which was then fused with local features by an attentional feature fusion mechanism. Subsequently, a modified path aggregation network oriented to collaboration perception of multi-scale features was proposed by incorporating a transformer encoder, the optimized CSP, and new skip connections. The quantitative results of utilizing the YOLOv5s-FP for pear detection were compared with other typical object detection networks of the YOLO series, recording the highest average precision of 96.12% with less detection time and computational cost. In qualitative experiments, the proposed network achieved superior visual performance with stronger robustness to the changes in occlusion and illumination conditions, particularly providing the ability to detect pears with different sizes in highly dense, overlapping environments and non-normal illumination areas. Therefore, the proposed YOLOv5s-FP network was practicable for detecting in-field pears in a real-time and accurate way, which could be an advantageous component of the technology for monitoring pear growth status and implementing automated harvesting in unmanned orchards.

Background: Orphan gene play an important role in the environmental stresses of many species and their identification is a critical step to understand biological functions. Moso bamboo has high ecological, economic and cultural value. Studies have shown that the growth of moso bamboo is influenced by various stresses. Several traditional methods are time-consuming and inefficient. Hence, the development of efficient and high-accuracy computational methods for predicting orphan genes is of great significance. Results: In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning model (CNN + Transformer) for identifying orphan genes in moso bamboo. It uses a convolutional neural network in combination with a transformer neural network to capture k-mer amino acids and features between k-mer amino acids in protein sequences. The experimental results show that the average balance accuracy value of CNN + Transformer on moso bamboo dataset can reach 0.875, and the average Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) value can reach 0.471. For the same testing set, the Balance Accuracy (BA), Geometric Mean (GM), Bookmaker Informedness (BM), and MCC values of the recurrent neural network, long short-term memory, gated recurrent unit, and transformer models are all lower than those of CNN + Transformer, which indicated that the model has the extensive ability for OG identification in moso bamboo. Conclusions: CNN + Transformer model is feasible and obtains the credible predictive results. It may also provide valuable references for other related research. As our knowledge, this is the first model to adopt the deep learning techniques for identifying orphan genes in plants.

Biotic and abiotic plant stress (e.g., frost, fungi, diseases) can significantly impact crop production. It is thus essential to detect such stress at an early stage before visual symptoms and damage become apparent. To this end, this paper proposes a novel deep learning method, called Spectral Convolution and Channel Attention Network (SC-CAN), which exploits the difference in spectral responses of healthy and stressed crops. The proposed SC-CAN method comprises two main modules: (i) a spectral convolution module, which consists of dilated causal convolutional layers stacked in a residual manner to capture the spectral features; (ii) a channel attention module, which consists of a global pooling layer and fully connected layers that compute inter-relationship between feature map channels before scaling them based on their importance level (attention score). Unlike standard convolution, which focuses on learning local features, the dilated convolution layers can learn both local and global features. These layers also have long receptive fields, making them suitable for capturing long dependency patterns in hyperspectral data. However, because not all feature maps produced by the dilated convolutional layers are important, we propose a channel attention module that weights the feature maps according to their importance level. We used SC-CAN to classify salt stress (i.e., abiotic stress) on four datasets (Chinese Spring (CS), Aegilops columnaris (co(CS)), Ae. speltoides auchery (sp(CS)), and Kharchia datasets) and Fusarium head blight disease (i.e., biotic stress) on Fusarium dataset. Reported experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques with an overall accuracy of 83.08%, 88.90%, 82.44%, 82.10%, and 82.78% on CS, co(CS), sp(CS), Kharchia, and Fusarium datasets, respectively.