PollenDetect: An Open-Source Pollen Viability Status Recognition System Based on Deep Learning Neural Networks.

Abstract

Pollen grains, the male gametophytes for reproduction in higher plants, are vulnerable to various stresses that lead to loss of viability and eventually crop yield. A conventional method for assessing pollen viability is manual counting after staining, which is laborious and hinders high-throughput screening. We developed an automatic detection tool (PollenDetect) to distinguish viable and nonviable pollen based on the YOLOv5 neural network, which is adjusted to adapt to the small target detection task. Compared with manual work, PollenDetect significantly reduced detection time (from approximately 3 min to 1 s for each image). Meanwhile, PollenDetect can maintain high detection accuracy. When PollenDetect was tested on cotton pollen viability, 99% accuracy was achieved. Furthermore, the results obtained using PollenDetect show that high temperature weakened cotton pollen viability, which is highly similar to the pollen viability results obtained using 2,3,5-triphenyltetrazolium formazan quantification. PollenDetect is an open-source software that can be further trained to count different types of pollen for research purposes. Thus, PollenDetect is a rapid and accurate system for recognizing pollen viability status, and is important for screening stress-resistant crop varieties for the identification of pollen viability and stress resistance genes during genetic breeding research.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物花粉の生存性という状態を画像から自動推定する深層学習ツールを開発し、手動計数および染色法と精度・速度を比較検証しているため、方法が研究の中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper's PollenDetect source code and model details are openly available on the authors' GitHub repository, as stated in the Data Availability Statement. The supplement describes dataset composition and annotation but does not explicitly state it contains the pollen images/annotations themselves, so only the code/re