Machine learning-enabled UAV hyperspectral identification of tomato spotted wilt virus in tobacco

Problems: Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus (TSWV) severely affects tobacco yield and quality, creating an urgent need for accurate, rapid, non-destructive monitoring to support disease management. While existing TSWV detection methods perform well at the leaf scale, their field-scale application remains challenging. Due to complex crop canopy structures, spectral characteristics at the field level differ significantly from leaf-level observations, and TSWV-sensitive spectral features are still unclear. This study therefore aims to develop a field-scale TSWV identification model using UAV-based hyperspectral imaging to enable targeted disease control. Methodology: A UAV-mounted hyperspectral camera (400-1000 nm) was deployed to capture imagery of tobacco plants at the rosette stage, enabling comparative spectral analysis between healthy and infected specimens. To identify sensitive features associated with tobacco plants infected with TSWV, six distinct feature extraction methodologies encompassing traditional statistical approaches (spectral ratio, correlation analysis, and principal component analysis [PCA]), machine learning-based techniques (relevant features [Relief], successive projections algorithm) and vegetation indices were utilized. Subsequently, we conducted a systematic evaluation of 18 classification models developed using three machine learning algorithms-support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbors, and extreme gradient boosting -with the derived feature variables. Results: This study demonstrates that while all integrated models combining Relief- and Correlation- selected feature bands with three machine learning algorithms delivered excellent performance, the SVM-Relief model achieved the most outstanding results (OA = 97.3%, AUC = 0.994, Kappa=0.947). Based on the SVM-Relief combination, a proposed method called RPR -which integrates PCA with recursive feature elimination- was further employed to reduce the number of feature indicators from 15 to 4 (775.6/772.9/781.1/756.4 nm). The resulting SVM-RPR combination model achieved performance (OA = 97.3%, AUC = 0.990, Kappa=0.947) comparable to that of the SVM-Relief model. Contribution: This indicated that red-edge bands were of significant value in distinguishing healthy and TSWV-infected tobacco plants. Our study indicates the significant potential of integrating UAV-based hyperspectral imaging with machine learning techniques for rapid, non-destructive detection of tobacco TSWV at the field scale. The proposed approach offers a novel and efficient pathway for remote sensing-based monitoring of viral diseases in crops, with implications for precision agriculture and plant disease management.