A fast high throughput plant phenotyping system using YOLO and Chan-Vese segmentation

Understanding plant traits is essential for decoding the behavior of various genomes and their reactions to environmental factors, paving the way for efficient and sustainable agricultural practices. Image-based plant phenotyping has become increasingly popular in modern agricultural research, effectively analyzing large-scale plant data. This study introduces a new high-throughput plant phenotyping system designed to examine plant growth patterns using segmentation analysis. This system consists of two main components: (i) A plant detector module that identifies individual plants within a high-throughput imaging setup, utilizing the Tiny-YOLOv4 (You Only Look Once) architecture. (ii) A segmentation module that accurately outlines the identified plants using the Chan-Vese segmentation algorithm. We tested our approach using top-view RGB tray images of the ‘Arabidopsis Thaliana’ plant species. The plant detector module achieved an impressive localization accuracy of 96.4% and an average Intersection over Union (IoU) of 77.42%. Additionally, the segmentation module demonstrated strong performance with dice and Jaccard scores of 0.95 and 0.91, respectively. These results highlight the system’s capability to define plant boundaries accurately. Our findings affirm the effectiveness of our high-throughput plant phenotyping system and underscore the importance of employing advanced computer vision techniques for precise plant trait analysis. These technological advancements promise to boost agricultural productivity, advance genetic research, and promote environmental sustainability in plant biology and agriculture.