Vision-spectroscopy cooperative sensing and cold atmospheric plasma inactivation for early warning and management of agricultural product diseases
Abstract
Pathogen-induced disease causes heavy post-harvest losses and threatens food safety, yet routine inspection rarely identifies an infection before it becomes visible. This study evaluates multimodal sensing, threshold-based early warning and plasma-based decontamination for post-harvest disease management in strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa cv. ‘Hongyan’). A dual-branch network, pairing a ResNet-34 visual encoder with a one-dimensional convolutional spectral encoder through bidirectional cross-modal attention, fuses RGB imagery with near-infrared hyperspectral reflectance. Across five severity grades the fused model reached 93.5 ± 0.7% accuracy over fifteen cross-validation runs and 94.2% on a fruit-level held-out test set of 260 samples (95% CI 91.4 to 97.1), with a weighted F1 score of 0.938 and a Cohen’s Kappa of 0.927. Its 2.7-point margin over an unweighted late-fusion baseline did not reach significance after correction for eleven held-out comparisons (continuity-corrected McNemar χ 2 = 4.00, Holm-adjusted p = 0.140). Alarms preceded the expert-confirmed transition to a visible lesion by 52.0 ± 9.6 h in the 80-fruit monitoring cohort. Cold atmospheric plasma parameters were screened systematically: 1.5 W/cm ² in Ar/O ₂ for 180 s delivered more than a 3.5-log reduction for Botrytis cinerea , Colletotrichum gloeosporioides and Aspergillus niger ; the measured quality attributes did not differ significantly from untreated controls under the tested conditions. Leakage assays and a sigmoidal dose-response model support membrane damage associated with oxidative stress. The proposed progression from membrane peroxidation through enzyme disruption to DNA damage remains a mechanistic hypothesis. Sensing and treatment were evaluated separately; the present evidence is limited to one commodity, laboratory conditions and no integrated pilot-scale trial.
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BibTeX
@article{sun2026visionspectroscopy,
title = {{Vision-spectroscopy cooperative sensing and cold atmospheric plasma inactivation for early warning and management of agricultural product diseases}},
author = {BaoJing Sun and Wei Zhang and XiaoLong Hu},
journal = {Scientific Reports},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1038/s41598-026-75069-z},
url = {https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-75069-z},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Vision-spectroscopy cooperative sensing and cold atmospheric plasma inactivation for early warning and management of agricultural product diseases
AU - BaoJing Sun
AU - Wei Zhang
AU - XiaoLong Hu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/14
JO - Scientific Reports
DO - 10.1038/s41598-026-75069-z
UR - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-75069-z
AB - Pathogen-induced disease causes heavy post-harvest losses and threatens food safety, yet routine inspection rarely identifies an infection before it becomes visible. This study evaluates multimodal sensing, threshold-based early warning and plasma-based decontamination for post-harvest disease management in strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa cv. ‘Hongyan’). A dual-branch network, pairing a ResNet-34 visual encoder with a one-dimensional convolutional spectral encoder through bidirectional cross-modal attention, fuses RGB imagery with near-infrared hyperspectral reflectance. Across five severity grades the fused model reached 93.5 ± 0.7% accuracy over fifteen cross-validation runs and 94.2% on a fruit-level held-out test set of 260 samples (95% CI 91.4 to 97.1), with a weighted F1 score of 0.938 and a Cohen’s Kappa of 0.927. Its 2.7-point margin over an unweighted late-fusion baseline did not reach significance after correction for eleven held-out comparisons (continuity-corrected McNemar χ ^2 = 4.00, Holm-adjusted p = 0.140). Alarms preceded the expert-confirmed transition to a visible lesion by 52.0 ± 9.6 h in the 80-fruit monitoring cohort. Cold atmospheric plasma parameters were screened systematically: 1.5 W/cm ² in Ar/O ₂ for 180 s delivered more than a 3.5-log reduction for Botrytis cinerea , Colletotrichum gloeosporioides and Aspergillus niger ; the measured quality attributes did not differ significantly from untreated controls under the tested conditions. Leakage assays and a sigmoidal dose-response model support membrane damage associated with oxidative stress. The proposed progression from membrane peroxidation through enzyme disruption to DNA damage remains a mechanistic hypothesis. Sensing and treatment were evaluated separately; the present evidence is limited to one commodity, laboratory conditions and no integrated pilot-scale trial.
SN - 2045-2322
ER -