High-throughput field crop phenotyping: current status and challenges

Abstract

In contrast to the rapid advances made in plant genotyping, plant phenotyping is considered a bottleneck in plant science. This has promoted high-throughput plant phenotyping (HTP) studies, resulting in an exponential increase in phenotyping-related publications. The development of HTP was originally intended for use as indoor HTP technologies for model plant species under controlled environments. However, this subsequently shifted to HTP for use in crops in fields. Although HTP in fields is much more difficult to conduct due to unstable environmental conditions compared to HTP in controlled environments, recent advances in HTP technology have allowed these difficulties to be overcome, allowing for rapid, efficient, non-destructive, non-invasive, quantitative, repeatable, and objective phenotyping. Recent HTP developments have been accelerated by the advances in data analysis, sensors, and robot technologies, including machine learning, image analysis, three dimensional (3D) reconstruction, image sensors, laser sensors, environmental sensors, and drones, along with high-speed computational resources. This article provides an overview of recent HTP technologies, focusing mainly on canopy-based phenotypes of major crops, such as canopy height, canopy coverage, canopy biomass, and canopy stressed appearance, in addition to crop organ detection and counting in the fields. Current topics in field HTP are also presented, followed by a discussion on the low rates of adoption of HTP in practical breeding programs.

Plant phenotyping relevance

圃場ハイスループット植物フェノタイピングの技術、センサー、画像解析、3D再構成、ロボット技術を中心に概説するレビューであり、植物形質取得手法が主題である。

Code and data availability

This is a review article surveying high-throughput field crop phenotyping. It describes no measurements, datasets, images, code, or models generated by this paper itself. All mentioned datasets (e.g., Global Wheat Head Detection benchmark, EasyPCC, ImageNet) and repositories belong to cited prior work or are generic/un

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