FlowerPhenoNet: Automated Flower Detection from Multi-View Image Sequences Using Deep Neural Networks for Temporal Plant Phenotyping Analysis

Abstract

A phenotype is the composite of an observable expression of a genome for traits in a given environment. The trajectories of phenotypes computed from an image sequence and timing of important events in a plant’s life cycle can be viewed as temporal phenotypes and indicative of the plant’s growth pattern and vigor. In this paper, we introduce a novel method called FlowerPhenoNet, which uses deep neural networks for detecting flowers from multiview image sequences for high-throughput temporal plant phenotyping analysis. Following flower detection, a set of novel flower-based phenotypes are computed, e.g., the day of emergence of the first flower in a plant’s life cycle, the total number of flowers present in the plant at a given time, the highest number of flowers bloomed in the plant, growth trajectory of a flower, and the blooming trajectory of a plant. To develop a new algorithm and facilitate performance evaluation based on experimental analysis, a benchmark dataset is indispensable. Thus, we introduce a benchmark dataset called FlowerPheno, which comprises image sequences of three flowering plant species, e.g., sunflower, coleus, and canna, captured by a visible light camera in a high-throughput plant phenotyping platform from multiple view angles. The experimental analyses on the FlowerPheno dataset demonstrate the efficacy of the FlowerPhenoNet.

Plant phenotyping relevance

花の検出と時系列表現型の抽出を行う深層学習手法を開発し、ベンチマークデータセットと評価も提示しており、植物フェノタイピング手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper publicly releases the FlowerPheno benchmark dataset (17,022 multiview RGB image sequences of sunflower, canna, and coleus with ground-truth flower bounding boxes) and the FlowerPhenoNet source code, both with explicit availability statements and URLs.