Phenotypic dynamics and temporal heritability of tomato architectural traits using an unmanned ground vehicle-based plant phenotyping system

Abstract

Large-scale manual measurements of plant architectural traits in tomato growth are laborious and subjective, hindering deeper understanding of temporal variations in gene expression heterogeneity. This study develops a high-throughput approach for characterizing tomato architectural traits at different growth stages and mapping temporal broad-sense heritability using an unmanned ground vehicle-based plant phenotyping system. The SegFormer with fusion of multispectral and depth imaging modalities was employed to semantically segment plant organs from the registered RGB-D and multispectral images. Organ point clouds were then generated and clustered into instances. Finally, six key architectural traits, including fruit spacing (FS), inflorescence height (IH), stem thickness (ST), leaf spacing (LS), total leaf area (TLA), and leaf inclination angle (LIA) were extracted and the temporal broad-sense heritability folds were plotted. The RMSEs of the estimated FS, IH, ST and LS were 0.014 m, 0.043 m, 0.003 m and 0.015 m. The visualizations of the estimated TLA and LIA matched the actual growth trends. The broad-sense heritability of the extracted traits exhibited different trends across the growth stages: i) ST, IH, and FS had a gradually increased broad sense heritability over time, ii) LS and LIA had a decreasing trend, and iii) TLA showed fluctuations (i.e., an M-shaped pattern) of the broad sense heritability throughout the growth period. The developed system and analytical approach are promising tools for accurate and rapid characterization of spatiotemporal changes of tomato plant architecture in controlled environments, laying the foundation for efficient crop breeding and precision production management in the future.