Segment Any Plant (SAP): Foundation-Model Segmentation for Plant Time-Series Phenotyping

Abstract

Quantitative studies of plant growth and environmental responses increasingly rely on time-series imaging, yet automated segmentation remains challenging due to continuous growth, large non-rigid morphological change, and frequent self-occlusion. Traditional image-processing pipelines and task-specific deep learning models often require extensive annotated datasets and retraining, limiting portability across species, developmental stages, and imaging conditions. Here we present SAP (Segment Any Plant), a plant-focused framework that leverages the pretrained Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) to enable few-shot, training-free segmentation of plant time-series imagery. SAP integrates interactive prompting, automated temporal mask propagation, and centerline extraction within a web-based interface, allowing users to move from raw images to quantitative descriptors of organ shape and dynamics without programming expertise. Across multiple systems, including Arabidopsis thaliana rosette development, root growth, sunflower gravitropism, and confocal root microscopy, SAP achieves high segmentation accuracy (mean IoU 0.89–0.93) and sub-pixel centerline precision from single-frame prompting. By reducing the need for task-specific retraining, SAP provides a transferable framework for reproducible time-series phenotyping across diverse experimental contexts.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物の時系列画像から器官形状・動態を抽出するセグメンテーション手法とWeb基盤を開発し、複数系で精度検証しているため、植物フェノタイピング手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper's authors publicly release both the SAP analysis code (GitHub repository) and the datasets generated/analyzed in the study (Zenodo), including raw images, ground-truth and SAP-generated segmentation masks, centerline validation data, and supplementary videos. Both are paper-specific, public, and directly cit.