Detection of wheat Fusarium head blight using UAV-based spectral and image feature fusion

Infection caused by Fusarium head blight (FHB) has severely damaged the quality and yield of wheat in China and threatened the health of humans and livestock. Inaccurate disease detection increases the use cost of pesticide and pollutes farmland, highlighting the need for FHB detection in wheat fields. The combination of spectral and spatial information provided by image analysis facilitates the detection of infection-related damage in crops. In this study, an effective detection method for wheat FHB based on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) hyperspectral images was explored by fusing spectral features and image features. Spectral features mainly refer to band features, and image features mainly include texture and color features. Our aim was to explain all aspects of wheat infection through multi-class feature fusion and to find the best FHB detection method for field wheat combining current advanced algorithms. We first evaluated the quality of the two acquired UAV images and eliminated the excessively noisy bands in the images. Then, the spectral features, texture features, and color features in the images were extracted. The random forest (RF) algorithm was used to optimize features, and the importance value of the features determined whether the features were retained. Feature combinations included spectral features, spectral and texture features fusion, and the fusion of spectral, texture, and color features to combine support vector machine, RF, and back propagation neural network in constructing wheat FHB detection models. The results showed that the model based on the fusion of spectral, texture, and color features using the RF algorithm achieved the best performance, with a prediction accuracy of 85%. The method proposed in this study may provide an effective way of FHB detection in field wheat.