High-throughput plant phenotyping with hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is pivotal for accelerating crop improvement to address global food security. Adoption is limited by a data-processing bottleneck, forcing a trade-off between costly, inflexible commercial software and programming-intensive open-source libraries. To overcome this barrier, we developed PlantSpecLab, an open-source, no-code platform that unifies the HSI workflow from image processing to modeling within a single interactive interface. The platform introduces spectrally guided segmentation strategies (Range Averaging, Difference Enhancement) and a spectral Fractional-Order Differencing (FOD) preprocessor to enhance extraction of subtle, physiologically relevant features. Across diverse in-house and public datasets, FOD-preprocessed spectra improved model performance over conventional pipelines, yielding a mean classification accuracy of 82.86 % for tomato maturity and average R² = 0.8638 for fruit firmness. In cross-software benchmarks, PlantSpecLab matched the accuracy of ENVI and code-based Python pipelines while reducing end-to-end workflow time by over 90 % (from approximately 80 minutes to about 8 minutes). PlantSpecLab provides a transparent, efficient analytical environment that lowers the technical barrier to HSI analysis. This enables researchers to prioritize biological interpretation while minimizing computational overhead.

Heavy metal pollution is becoming a prominent stress on plants. Plants contaminated with heavy metals undergo changes in external morphology and internal structure, and heavy metals can accumulate through the food chain, threatening human health. Detecting heavy metal stress on plants quickly, accurately, and nondestructively helps to achieve precise management of plant growth status and accelerate the breeding of heavy metal-resistant plant varieties. Traditional chemical reagent-based detection methods are laborious, destructive, time-consuming, and costly. The internal and external structures of plants can be altered by heavy metal contamination, which can lead to changes in plants’ absorption and reflection of light. Visible/near-infrared (V/NIR) spectroscopy can obtain plant spectral information, and hyperspectral imaging (HSI) can obtain spectral and spatial information in simple, speedy, and nondestructive ways. These 2 technologies have been the most widely used high-throughput phenotyping technologies of plants. This review summarizes the application of V/NIR spectroscopy and HSI in plant heavy metal stress phenotype analysis as well as introduces the method of combining spectroscopy with machine learning approaches for high-throughput phenotyping of plant heavy metal stress, including unstressed and stressed identification, stress types identification, stress degrees identification, and heavy metal content estimation. The vegetation indexes, full-range spectra, and feature bands identified by different plant heavy metal stress phenotyping methods are reviewed. The advantages, limitations, challenges, and prospects of V/NIR spectroscopy and HSI for plant heavy metal stress phenotyping are discussed. Further studies are needed to promote the research and application of V/NIR spectroscopy and HSI for plant heavy metal stress phenotyping.