Abstract:The rapid spread of tomato leaf mould can lead to significant losses, and timely detection and identification of the disease is of great importance. Totally 170 tomato leaf mould latent stage day 5 sample curves and 170 tomato healthy sample curves were labeled and extracted based on hyperspectral imaging. Spectral pre-processing of the data was done by four methods: min-max normalization (MMN), standard normal variate (SNV), wavelet transform (WT) and baseline correction (BC), and abnormal samples were rejected by using a clustering algorithm (K-means). The competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) algorithm was used for feature band selection, and the selected single feature bands were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Finally, two classification methods, namely support vector machine (SVM) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA), were employed to identify leaf mould latent stage samples and healthy samples, and a total of eight machine learning-based identification models for tomato leaf mould latent stage detection were constructed and compared to find the optimal model. The results showed that the feature bands selected by the CARS algorithm had a positive effect on the overall recognition, and the WT-CARS-LDA model performed the best, with an accuracy of 97.62%. The hyperspectral imaging technology was combined with the machine learning method, and a highly efficient and accurate identification model was successfully constructed for tomato leaf mould potential stage detection. The research result can provide a feasible technical solution for early detection and control of tomato leaf mould.