Low-cost and precise traditional Chinese medicinal tree pest and disease monitoring using UAV RGB image only

Abstract Accurate and timely pest and disease monitoring during the cultivation process of traditional Chinese medicinal materials is crucial for ensuring optimal growth, increased yield, and enhanced content of effective components. This paper focuses on the essential requirements for pest and disease monitoring in a planting base of Cinnamomum Camphora var. Borneol (CCB) and presents a solution using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images to address the limitations of real-time and on-site inspections. In contrast to existing solutions that rely on advanced sensors like multispectral or hyperspectral sensors mounted on UAVs, this paper utilizes visible light sensors directly. It introduces an ensemble learning approach for pest and disease monitoring of CCB trees based on RGB-derived vegetation indices and a combination of various machine learning algorithms. By leveraging the feature extraction capabilities of multiple algorithms such as RF, SVM, KNN, GBDT, XGBoost, GNB, and ELM, and incorporating morphological filtering post-processing and genetic algorithms to assign weights to each classifier for optimal weight combination, a novel ensemble learning strategy is proposed to significantly enhance the accuracy of pest and disease monitoring of CCB trees. Experimental results validate that the proposed method can achieve precise pest and disease monitoring with reduced training samples, exhibiting high generalization ability. It enables large-scale pest and disease monitoring at a low cost and high precision, thereby contributing to improved precision in the cultivation management of traditional Chinese medicinal materials.