StomaQuant: Deep Learning-Based Quantification for Stomatal Trait Assessment

Abstract

ABSTRACT Stomata are microscopic pores that play a vital role in transpiration and gaseous exchange from leaf surfaces in plants. The stomatal density and size directly influence photosynthesis and hydrodynamics capacity. Conventional approaches for counting and determining stomatal density is labour-intensive and lack scalability. Although there are several AI-based stomata finder tools that were published in the last decade, existing models were trained on model plants like wheat, barley and Arabidopsis . Stomata in such model plants are generally elliptical, but applying a universal model to all plant species is not feasible due to their diverse morphological characteristics. Previous studies have suggested using the stomatal index to quantify the ratio between epidermal cells and total stomatal count. However, this approach can be difficult to apply consistently, as epidermal cell shape and size vary across plant species. Instead, we propose measuring stomatal density based on the number of stomata per total imaged pixel area in the captured images. In this study, a comparison between YOLOv12 and RF-DETR models were made for real-time stomata detection in normal and difficult-to-image and out-of-focus occluded images. The in-house training dataset consisted of images of 300 rice,100 barley and 50 sugarcane leaves that were captured against a dark background. YOLOv12 outperformed RF-DETR with higher mAP50:95 score. The models were trained with image augmentation for 300 epochs and YOLOv12 achieved a peak mean average precision of 98.5% and exceled at detecting stomata across abaxial and adaxial surfaces of leaves of both monocot and dicot plants. StomaQuant has also been shown to be effective for both epidermal peel and ethanol decolorised samples. Thus, StomaQuant can be used to effectively and efficiently estimate the stomatal density and size in a wide range of host plant species.

Plant phenotyping relevance

気孔の検出・密度・サイズ推定を目的とする深層学習画像解析手法を開発し、複数モデルおよび困難画像で性能比較・検証しており、植物表現型取得が研究の中心である。

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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