Scientists of the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Plant Protection (VIZR) are developing a new method for monitoring and diagnosing plant diseases - the technique of hyperspectral sounding, reportspress service of the Institute. It will allow using modern sensor systems to analyze the state of the plant and identify diseases at an early stage.
Today, one of the priority areas in scientific plant growing is the development and improvement of methods for protecting plants from diseases and pests. Accordingly, research in this area is actively developing - monitoring and diagnostics.
Thus, researchers from VIZR create new methods for diagnosing plant diseases using modern sensor systems. The most promising of these devices are multi- and hyperspectral cameras and Raman spectrometers. Such sensors capture the slightest changes in the structure of plant leaves and show the presence of pathogenic organisms in them.
Hyperspectral sensing technology is a remote tool for monitoring adverse factors that negatively affect plants: temperature fluctuations, drought, nutrient deficiency. With hyperspectral imaging, scientists collect and store information about an object in a spectral cube that contains spatial information and hundreds of adjacent wavelengths in the third dimension.
The hyperspectral camera allows you to shoot, during which you can see even the smallest changes in any objects. Such visualization makes it possible to recognize plant diseases as early as possible, providing preliminary indicators through subtle changes in the absorption or reflection spectral capacity and detecting minute changes in the soil and individual leaves. Thus, hyperspectral images can be used to solve a very wide class of problems of accurate and timely determination of the physiological state of plants. The creation of automatic systems based on this technology will help solve the problem of collecting data on the state of plants on large areas of forest and agricultural land and eliminate the influence of the human factor in the task of monitoring the state of plants.
“This area of research is one of the most promising, as it falls into the list of priority areas of the Program of Fundamental Scientific Research in the Russian Federation for a long-term period under the item “New systems and methods for monitoring the phytosanitary state of agrobiocenoses and diagnosing microorganisms. Our team will make every effort to create domestic systems for monitoring and diagnosing plant diseases to ensure the country's food security,” says Viktor Dolzhenko, head of the VIZR Center for Biological Regulation of Pesticides, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences.