Machine Learning-Based Plant Detection Algorithms to Automate Counting Tasks Using 3D Canopy Scans.

Abstract

This study tested whether machine learning (ML) methods can effectively separate individual plants from complex 3D canopy laser scans as a prerequisite to analyzing particular plant features. For this, we scanned mung bean and chickpea crops with PlantEye (R) laser scanners. Firstly, we segmented the crop canopies from the background in 3D space using the Region Growing Segmentation algorithm. Then, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based ML algorithms were fine-tuned for plant counting. Application of the CNN-based (Convolutional Neural Network) processing architecture was possible only after we reduced the dimensionality of the data to 2D. This allowed for the identification of individual plants and their counting with an accuracy of 93.18% and 92.87% for mung bean and chickpea plants, respectively. These steps were connected to the phenotyping pipeline, which can now replace manual counting operations that are inefficient, costly, and error-prone. The use of CNN in this study was innovatively solved with dimensionality reduction, addition of height information as color, and consequent application of a 2D CNN-based approach. We found there to be a wide gap in the use of ML on 3D information. This gap will have to be addressed, especially for more complex plant feature extractions, which we intend to implement through further research.

Plant phenotyping relevance

3Dレーザースキャンから個体植物を分離・計数する画像解析手法を開発し、CNNの精度評価とフェノタイピングパイプラインへの統合を行っており、植物表現型取得が研究の中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper's plant detection/counting pipeline source code is explicitly published on the authors' GitHub repository, stated in both the Conclusions and Data Availability Statement. No public phenotype dataset or trained model deposit is stated.