Early detection of verticillium wilt in eggplant leaves by fusing five image channels: a deep learning approach

As one of the world's most important vegetable crops, eggplant production is often severely affected by verticillium wilt, leading to significant declines in yield and quality. Traditional multispectral disease-imaging equipment is expensive and complicated to operate. Low-cost multispectral devices cannot capture images and cover less information. The traditional approach to early disease diagnosis involves using multispectral disease-imaging equipment in conjunction with machine learning technology. However, this approach has significant limitations in early disease diagnosis, including challenges such as high costs, complex operation, and low model performance. The aim of this study was to combine low-cost multispectral cameras with deep learning technology to detect early stage Verticillium wilt in eggplant effectively. Using the Manual FS-3200T-10GE-NNC multispectral camera to perform multispectral imaging of the leaves of eggplant seedlings at the early infection stage, information fusion was performed on the collected multispectral images, and a five-channel image information fusion model was established. Image information fusion technology was combined with deep learning technology, among which the VGG16-triplet attention model performed the best, achieving a precision of 86.73% on the test set. Model validation on 48- and 72-hour data reached a precision of 75% and 82%, respectively, achieving an early diagnosis of Verticillium wilt. This highlighted the potential of multispectral cameras for early disease detection. In this study, we successfully developed a method for the non-destructive detection of the early stages of eggplant wilt disease by combining multispectral imaging technology with deep learning algorithms. While ensuring high accuracy, this method significantly reduces the cost of experimental equipment. The application of this method can reduce the cost of agricultural equipment and provide a scientific basis for agricultural production practices, helping to reduce losses caused by diseases.