Determination of the melanin and anthocyanin content in barley grains by digital image analysis using machine learning methods.

Abstract

The pigment composition of plant seed coat affects important properties such as resistance to pathogens, pre-harvest sprouting, and mechanical hardness. The dark color of barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) grain can be attributed to the synthesis and accumulation of two groups of pigments. Blue and purple grain color is associated with the biosynthesis of anthocyanins. Gray and black grain color is caused by melanin. These pigments may accumulate in the grain shells both individually and together. Therefore, it is difficult to visually distinguish which pigments are responsible for the dark color of the grain. Chemical methods are used to accurately determine the presence/ absence of pigments; however, they are expensive and labor-intensive. Therefore, the development of a new method for quickly assessing the presence of pigments in the grain would help in investigating the mechanisms of genetic control of the pigment composition of barley grains. In this work, we developed a method for assessing the presence or absence of anthocyanins and melanin in the barley grain shell based on digital image analysis using computer vision and machine learning algorithms. A protocol was developed to obtain digital RGB images of barley grains. Using this protocol, a total of 972 images were acquired for 108 barley accessions. Seed coat from these accessions may contain anthocyanins, melanins, or pigments of both types. Chemical methods were used to accurately determine the pigment content of the grains. Four models based on computer vision techniques and convolutional neural networks of different architectures were developed to predict grain pigment composition from images. The U-Net network model based on the EfficientNetB0 topology showed the best performance in the holdout set (the value of the "accuracy" parameter was 0.821).

Plant phenotyping relevance

大麦粒の画像から種皮のアントシアニン・メラニン組成を推定する画像解析・機械学習法を開発し、化学分析で検証しているため、植物表現型取得法が中心である。

Code and data availability

植物フェノタイピング解析を再現する公開資産であることを、入力本文と直接リンクから確認できなかったため保留しました。

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