Abstract:Accurate inversion and estimation of SPAD content and severity of cucumber downy mildew are of great significance for the management of the disease.Current research predominantly focused on overall leaf analysis, overlooking the inversion and estimation of SPAD content and severity of individual lesions.Moreover, traditional methods for SPAD inversion and severity estimation were time-consuming and labor-intensive.Therefore, it was aimed to investigate the SPAD inversion and severity estimation of individual cucumber downy mildew lesions based on ABC-CatBoost and spectral indices.By acquiring Fv/Fm images of infected leaves, the severity of different lesions was classified.Corresponding SPAD values and hyperspectral data of the lesions were also collected.To enhance the correlation between spectral data and SPAD content and severity, and reduce the impact of noise on modeling accuracy, MMS and Detrend data preprocessing methods were utilized.Optimal spectral feature bands were extracted from raw, MMS, and Detrend preprocessed data based on constructed one-dimensional, two-dimensional, and three-dimensional spectral indices.Using these features, the ABC-CatBoost model was employed to achieve SPAD inversion and severity estimation of cucumber downy mildew lesions.The results showed that the CatBoost algorithm, optimized by the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, significantly improved the accuracy of SPAD inversion and severity estimation.Compared with one-dimensional spectral indices, two-dimensional and three-dimensional spectral indices, with their ability to integrate multidimensional information, demonstrated superior performance.Specifically, after Detrend preprocessing, the coefficients of determination between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional spectral indices and SPAD reached 0.927.In severity estimation, the accuracy between the Detrend-preprocessed two-dimensional spectral indices and the MMS-preprocessed three-dimensional spectral indices and the severity reached 90.90%, further demonstrating that Detrend preprocessing was superior to MMS.The research result can not only provide a reliable scientific basis for managing downy mildew but also have significant implications for improving the yield and quality of cucumber production.