Plant Screen Mobile: an open-source mobile device app for plant trait analysis.

Abstract

Background The development of leaf area is one of the fundamental variables to quantify plant growth and physiological function and is therefore widely used to characterize genotypes and their interaction with the environment. To date, analysis of leaf area often requires elaborate and destructive measurements or imaging-based methods accompanied by automation that may result in costly solutions. Consequently in recent years there is an increasing trend towards simple and affordable sensor solutions and methodologies. A major focus is currently on harnessing the potential of applications developed for smartphones that provide access to analysis tools to a wide user basis. However, most existing applications entail significant manual effort during data acquisition and analysis. Results With the development of Plant Screen Mobile we provide a suitable smartphone solution for estimating digital proxies of leaf area and biomass in various imaging scenarios in the lab, greenhouse and in the field. To distinguish between plant tissue and background the core of the application comprises different classification approaches that can be parametrized by users delivering results on-the-fly. We demonstrate the practical applications of computing projected leaf area based on two case studies with Eragrostis and Musa plants. These studies showed highly significant correlations with destructive measurements of leaf area and biomass from both ground truth measurements and estimations from well-established screening systems. Conclusions We show that a smartphone together with our analysis tool Plant Screen Mobile is a suitable platform for rapid quantification of leaf and shoot development of various plant architectures. Beyond the estimation of projected leaf area the app can also be used to quantify color and shape parameters of other plant material including seeds and flowers.

Plant phenotyping relevance

スマートフォン画像と分類アルゴリズムによる葉面積・バイオマス推定アプリを開発し、破壊測定および既存システムと検証しており、植物表現型取得が中心である。

Code and data availability

The authors deposited the plant image data and corresponding ground truth measurements from the banana and Eragrostis case studies in the e!DAL research data publication system (DOI 10.25622/FZJ/2018/1), a paper-specific public asset. The project homepage (fz-juelich.de/ibg/ibg-2/psm) hosts the app and manual but is a