DINO-Pheno-Cluster: Integrating few-shot foundation models and UAV time-series for spatiotemporal growth and functional characterization of alfalfa

Abstract

Precise characterization of alfalfa growth dynamics is essential for breeding accessions with superior regrowth capacity, persistence, and yield stability. However, traditional plot level and coarse scale observations suffer from low signal to noise ratios particularly before canopy closure when phenotypic data are strongly affected by weeds and soil background. Moreover, existing studies rarely capture the dynamic mechanisms of crop development across the entire growth cycle. To address this, the DINO-Pheno-Cluster framework is introduced as a foundation model driven and mechanism decomposed phenotyping approach. This decoupled framework first utilizes DINO-XMem, a few-shot individual plant segmentation network based on DINOv3 and a dual memory mechanism. It subsequently applies parameterized dynamic modeling guided by growth process knowledge. Validation utilized high frequency Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery from 12 time points across three growing seasons covering 127 alfalfa accessions. DINO-XMem achieved an 89.54% mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) under a 10-shot setting and maintained 86.77% under extreme 1-shot conditions. It successfully resolved dense canopy oversegmentation outperforming fully supervised baselines by 4.08% to 11.97% in mIoU. Crucially, the extracted high purity time series trajectories were parameterized into specific biological indicators including maximum growth rate, comprehensive regeneration index, and seasonal stability index. Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) clustering based on these mechanistic traits identified four distinct functional ideotypes comprising High yield/High regrowth, Upright/Sparse, High stability/Persistent, and Short/Dense, all validated by ground measured biomass. This workflow establishes a precision screening tool for multi harvest crops advancing crop phenomics toward process level analysis.