Identification of maize seed vigor based on hyperspectral imaging and deep learning

Background Seed vigor identification is critical to guaranteeing the quality and yield of maize. Although seeds with impaired vigor may germinate under normal conditions, planting under unfavorable conditions makes it difficult to produce healthy plants. Therefore, non-destructive and rapid detection of seed vigor using hyperspectral imaging (HSI) technology is crucial for improving crop production efficiency. Methods Hyperspectral images of maize seeds were acquired employing the HSI system, the original spectra were preprocessed using Savitzky–Golay smoothing and multiplicative scatter correction, and the feature wavelengths were extracted using the successive projections algorithm (SPA). Discriminant models were constructed based on support vector machine (SVM), random forest, artificial neural network (ANN), and convolutional neural network (CNN-DC). Results The results showed that SVM, ANN, and CNN-DC could discriminate well between maize seeds with different vigor levels, and their accuracy rate was over 70%. The SPA algorithm showed that the RMSE value achieved a minimum of 0.3406, while the number of variables was 49. The CNN-DC model outperformed the other models, which reached the highest accuracy of 92.06%. This study demonstrates that DL combined with HSI has excellent potential for identifying seed vigor. Conclusions This study shows that the proposed method has excellent results for hyperspectral image data processing and can accurately identify maize seed vigor.