FloralArea: AI-powered algorithm for automated calculation of floral area from flower images to support plant and pollinator research

Abstract

Floral area is a major predictor of the attractiveness of a flowering plant for pollinators, yet the measurement of floral area is time-consuming and inconsistent across studies. Here, we developed an AI-powered algorithm, FloralArea, to automate floral area measurement from an image. The FloralArea algorithm has two main components: an object segmentation module and an area estimation module. The object segmentation module extracts the pixels of flowers and the reference object in an image. The area estimation module predicts floral area based on the ratio between flower and reference object pixels. We fine-tuned two YOLOv8 segmentation models for flower and reference object segmentation. The flower segmentation model achieved moderate precision, recall, mAP0.5, and mAP0.5-0.95 of 0.794, 0.68, 0.741, and 0.455 on the test dataset, while the reference object model achieved an impressive performance of 0.907, 0.940, 0.933, and 0.832. We evaluated FloralArea using 75 images of flowering plants. We used ImageJ to calculate the actual floral area for all the images and compared them with the predicted floral area from FloralArea. The predicted floral area correlated well with the measured floral area with a coefficient of determination (R 2 ) of 0.93 and a root mean square error of 20.58 cm 2 . The FloralArea algorithm reduced the time it takes to calculate floral area from an image by 99.24% compared with traditional methods with image processing tools like ImageJ. By streamlining floral area estimation, the FloralArea algorithm provides a scalable, efficient, consistent, and accessible tool for researchers, particularly to aid in assessing plant attractiveness to different pollinator groups.

Plant phenotyping relevance

花画像から花の面積という植物形質を自動抽出するAI手法を開発し、実測値との比較検証と処理時間評価を行っており、植物フェノタイピング手法が研究の中心です。

Code and data availability

The paper's authors publicly released the FloralArea source code on GitHub and the flower image dataset (used for fine-tuning YOLOv8 models and evaluating the algorithm) on Penn State's ScholarSphere repository, as stated in the Data Availability statement.