Assessing cotton boll-opening concentration for harvest decision-making via foundation model-enhanced cross-scale phenotyping.

Abstract

Boll-opening concentration is critical for mechanical cotton harvesting, yet it is still assessed mainly by manual records and single time-point indicators that miss temporal dynamics. To bridge the lack of a unified workflow linking vision foundation models, multi-temporal boll-opening monitoring, and harvest decision-making, we developed a cross-scale UAV high-throughput phenotyping framework centered on DINO-BollGX. DINO-BollGX couples a DINO v3 backbone, a RetinaNet detection head, and an adaptive refinement-and-suppression module for robust open-boll detection under complex field conditions. Using multi-temporal UAV imagery collected over two years for 383 cultivars, we reconstructed plot-scale time series of open-boll counts, derived dynamic features describing progression and intensity changes, and proposed a Cotton Boll-Opening Temporal Stability Index (CTSI) to quantify boll-opening rhythm and concentration; CTSI was further integrated with a time-based risk function to generate harvest decision curves. Under unified data and training settings, DINO-BollGX achieved precision = 0.91, F1 = 0.88, and AP@0.50 = 0.80, and provided accurate boll-count estimation (R 2 =0.98; MAE=3.10), outperforming YOLOv11, YOLOv12, YOLOv13, and RT-DETR. On an independent cross-year dataset acquired at 5 m altitude, it obtained precision = 0.98 and F1 = 0.87. An internal consistency analysis showed that CTSI had the expected negative association with Window_days (r = −0.83) and positive associations with Max_count (r = 0.78) and the boll-opening efficiency index (r = 0.92), reflecting the co-occurrence of temporal compactness and main-phase opening intensity in the cultivar population. CTSI ranged from −2.72 to 4.69 across cultivars, enabling identification of highly synchronized boll-opening. Harvest decision curves indicated that the relative net income index peaked at day 67 after the first observation and a compact optimal harvest window near the end of monitoring; on a fixed harvest date, Kuche 130292 (CTSI=4.69) produced 486 open bolls versus 182 for Xinluzao 36 (CTSI=0.53) and 90 for Andizhan-60 (CTSI=-2.72). Overall, the framework integrates dynamic boll-opening phenotyping with harvest timing optimization, supporting scalable cultivar screening and mechanization-ready deployment, with potential extension to harvest decision scenarios in other crops.

Plant phenotyping relevance

UAV画像と基盤モデルを用いて綿花の開絮を検出・定量し、時系列表現型指標を構築・検証する方法が研究の中心であるため。

Code and data availability

The paper publicly releases its cotton boll-opening UAV image dataset (3638 patches, 94,774 YOLO-format bounding-box annotations) on GitHub, directly supporting the paper's phenotyping analysis. No author analysis code or trained model checkpoints are explicitly deposited.