In Bioinspiration & biomimetics
The physiology of living organisms, such as living plants, is complex and particularly difficult to understand on a macroscopic, organism-holistic level. Among the many options to study plant physiology, electrical potential and tissue impedance are arguably simple measurement techniques to gather plant-level information. Despite the many possible uses, our research is exclusively driven by the idea of phytosensing, that is, interpreting living plants' signals to learn information about surrounding environmental conditions. As ready-to-use plant-level physiological models are not available, we consider the plant as a blackbox and apply statistics and machine learning to automatically interpret measured signals. In simple plant experiments, we expose Zamioculcas zamiifolia and Solanum lycopersicum (tomato) to four different stimuli: wind, heat, red and blue light. We measure electrical potential and tissue impedance signals. Given these signals, we evaluate a large variety of methods from statistical discriminant analysis and from deep learning for the classification problem of determining the correct stimulus to which the plant was exposed. We identify a set of methods that successfully classify stimuli with good accuracy without a clear winner. The statistical approach is competitive, partially depending on data availability for the machine learning approach. Our extensive results show the feasibility of the blackbox approach and can be used in future research to select appropriate classifier techniques for a given use case. In our own future research, we will exploit these methods to drive a phytosensing approach for air pollution monitoring in urban areas.
Buss Eduard, Aust Till, Wahby Mostafa, Rabbel Tim-Lucas, Kernbach Serge, Hamann Heiko
2023-Feb-09
artifical neural networks, discriminant analysis, electrophysiology, machine learning, phytosensing, tissue electrical impedance
