Enhanced classification of wheat disease: In-depth analysis of plant volatile organic compounds based on PTR-MS with prior knowledge and convolutional neural network

Abstract

Wheat diseases pose a significant threat to global food security by severely reducing crop yields. Rapid, accurate, and reliable identification of wheat infection status, disease types, and disease severity levels is essential for effective disease management. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which act as early indicators of plant stress, play a critical role in the early detection and diagnosis of wheat diseases. However, the low concentrations, transient nature, and complex composition of VOCs, combined with the dense canopy structure of wheat plants, present considerable challenges for VOC-based disease identification. To overcome these limitations, this study employed proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS) for the rapid detection of wheat diseases, focusing on mitigating fragment ion interference and mass-to-charge ratio overlap during VOCs spectral characterization. A novel feature recombination method was proposed to improve disease identification accuracy. This approach combines prior knowledge-guided feature recombination with convolutional neural networks for feature extraction, enhancing spectral interpretability and reducing feature redundancy, and enabling rapid VOC-based detection of wheat powdery mildew and stripe rust. Experimental validation demonstrates that the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 90.67% in classifying wheat diseases across different severity levels. Importantly, although this method was designed for wheat disease detection, its framework is adaptable and may be extended to other plant health monitoring applications using PTR-MS.

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