Integrating spectral and image information for prediction of cottonseed vitality

Cotton plays a significant role in people’s lives, and cottonseeds serve as a vital assurance for successful cotton cultivation and production. Premium-quality cottonseeds can significantly enhance the germination rate of cottonseeds, resulting in increased cotton yields. The vitality of cottonseeds is a crucial metric that reflects the quality of the seeds. However, currently, the industry lacks a non-destructive method to directly assess cottonseed vitality without compromising the integrity of the seeds. To address this challenge, this study employed a hyperspectral imaging acquisition system to gather hyperspectral data on cottonseeds. This system enables the simultaneous collection of hyperspectral data from 25 cottonseeds. This study extracted spectral and image information from the hyperspectral data of cottonseeds to predict their vitality. SG, SNV, and MSC methods were utilized to preprocess the spectral data of cottonseeds. Following this preprocessing step, feature wavelength points of the cottonseeds were extracted using SPA and CARS algorithms. Subsequently, GLCM was employed to extract texture features from images corresponding to these feature wavelength points, including attributes such as Contrast, Correlation, Energy, and Entropy. Finally, the vitality of cottonseeds was predicted using PLSR, SVR, and a self-built 1D-CNN model. For spectral data analysis, the 1D-CNN model constructed after MSC+CARS preprocessing demonstrated the highest performance, achieving a test set correlation coefficient of 0.9214 and an RMSE of 0.7017. For image data analysis, the 1D-CNN model constructed after SG+CARS preprocessing outperformed the others, yielding a test set correlation coefficient of 0.8032 and an RMSE of 0.9683. In the case of fused spectral and image data, the 1D-CNN model built after SG+SPA preprocessing displayed the best performance, attaining a test set correlation coefficient of 0.9427 and an RMSE of 0.6872. These findings highlight the effectiveness of the 1D-CNN model and the fusion of spectral and image features for cottonseed vitality prediction. This research contributes significantly to the development of automated detection devices for assessing cottonseed vitality.