Low temperature response index for monitoring freezing injury of tea plant

Freezing damage has been a common natural disaster for tea plantations. Quantitative detection of low temperature stress is significant for evaluating the degree of freezing injury to tea plants. Traditionally, the determination of physicochemical parameters of tea leaves and the investigation of freezing damage phenotype are the main approaches to detect the low temperature stress. However, these methods are time-consuming and laborious. In this study, different low temperature treatments were carried out on tea plants. The low temperature response index (LTRI) was established by measuring seven low temperature-induced components of tea leaves. The hyperspectral data of tea leaves was obtained by hyperspectral imaging and the feature bands were screened by successive projections algorithm (SPA), competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) and uninformative variable elimination (UVE). The LTRI and seven indexes of tea plant were modeled by partial least squares (PLS), support vector machine (SVM), random forests (RF), back propagation (BP) machine learning methods and convolutional neural networks (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM) deep learning methods. The results indicated that: (1) the best prediction model for the seven indicators was LTRI-UVE-CNN (R ^{2 =} 0.890, RMSEP=0.325, RPD=2.904); (2) the feature bands screened by UVE algorithm were more abundant, and the later modeling effect was better than CARS and SPA algorithm; (3) comparing the effects of the six modeling algorithms, the overall modeling effect of the CNN model was better than other models. It can be concluded that out of all the combined models in this paper, the LTRI-UVE-CNN was a promising model for predicting the degree of low temperature stress in tea plants.