Identifying General Stress in Commercial Tomatoes Based on Machine Learning Applied to Plant Electrophysiology

Automated monitoring of plant health is becoming a crucial component for optimizing agricultural production. Recently, several studies have shown that plant electrophysiology could be used as a tool to determine plant status related to applied stressors. However, to the best of our knowledge, there...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Elena Najdenovska, Fabien Dutoit, Daniel Tran, Antoine Rochat, Basile Vu, Marco Mazza, Cédric Camps, Carrol Plummer, Nigel Wallbridge, Laura Elena Raileanu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-06-01
Series:Applied Sciences
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/12/5640
Description
Summary:Automated monitoring of plant health is becoming a crucial component for optimizing agricultural production. Recently, several studies have shown that plant electrophysiology could be used as a tool to determine plant status related to applied stressors. However, to the best of our knowledge, there have been no studies relating electrical plant response to general stress responses as a proxy for plant health. This study models general stress of plants exposed to either biotic or abiotic stressors, namely drought, nutrient deficiencies or infestation with spider mites, using electrophysiological signals acquired from 36 plants. Moreover, in the signal processing procedure, the proposed workflow reuses information from the previous steps, therefore considerably reducing computation time regarding recent related approaches in the literature. Careful choice of the principal parameters leads to a classification of the general stress in plants with more than 80% accuracy. The main descriptive statistics measured together with the Hjorth complexity provide the most discriminative information for such classification. The presented findings open new paths to explore for improved monitoring of plant health.
ISSN:2076-3417