Environmental–Visual Fusion for Proactive Tomato Late Blight Management in Protected Horticulture

In protected horticultural production, tomato late blight shows strong environmental inducibility, with a short latent period, rapid risk accumulation, and a limited control window, which challenges conventional post-event disease monitoring. To address this, a tomato late blight risk perception and predictive control approach for protected production is proposed, integrating deep temporal modeling of environmental factors, visual symptom perception, and risk-driven greenhouse control to enable prospective assessment and proactive intervention. Based on disease mechanisms and real greenhouse conditions, an artificial intelligence (AI) framework covering perception, prediction, and regulation is constructed, moving beyond reliance on visible symptoms alone. Long-term evolution of key variables, including temperature, air humidity, leaf wetness, and light intensity, is modeled using deep temporal networks, while early weak lesions and subtle texture changes are captured by visual models. Cross-modal fusion in a unified risk space generates continuous risk scores to drive greenhouse regulation. Experiments on a multimodal dataset from a real greenhouse in Bayannur, Inner Mongolia, show that the proposed method outperforms vision-based and environment-based baselines in recognition and risk prediction. It achieves about 0.95 accuracy, 0.94 F1-score, and over 0.97 area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), while providing more than 20 h of early warning before disease onset. In environmental modeling, the deep temporal model consistently surpasses threshold-based methods, logistic regression, and long short-term memory/gated recurrent unit (LSTM/GRU) baselines in risk lead time, false alert rate, and prediction stability.