Time course sensor‐based phenotyping can predict Ascochyta blight disease severity in Cicer species

Abstract

Abstract Ascochyta blight is a widely occurring chickpea fungal disease that can cause severe yield loss. Breeding for crop resistance benefits from high‐throughput evaluation of plant–pathogen interactions in genotypes which can serve as sources of resistance. Current practice for the evaluation is human visual scoring of disease symptoms, which is limited in throughput and precision. Here, we developed open‐source sensor‐based phenotyping methods using red, green, blue (RGB) and multispectral imaging to measure resistance components and predict disease severity classes in chickpea and wild relatives grown outdoors over three seasons. Pots were imaged at multiple time points with a ground‐based platform, providing 86,792 RGB and 8199 multispectral images. Lesion count was estimated with YOLOv5 (You Only Look Once version 5) object detection (F1 score = 0.27–0.30), fractional green canopy cover was estimated from RGB images, and vegetation indices were extracted from multispectral images. A model trained on growth rates of fractional green canopy cover normalized to control genotypes could predict disease severity classes with an accuracy of 65% –81 % ( 0.43–0.59) on unseen data from three different seasons. The developed methods provide a pathway to predict visual disease severity scores and support the breeding of crops for disease resistance. They may also be used to characterize disease progression, to find underlying resistance mechanisms, and for early disease detection.

Plant phenotyping relevance

RGB・マルチスペクトル画像と地上センサープラットフォームを開発し、病斑数、緑色キャノピー被覆率、病害重症度を推定・予測する手法が研究の中心であるため。

Code and data availability

The supplied blocks describe sensor-based phenotyping (RGB/multispectral imaging, YOLOv5 lesion detection, MLP-NN segmentation, R/statgenHTP modeling) but contain no data availability statement, no public repository deposit, no author code URL, and no supplement link for the paper's images, annotations, trained models,

No evidence-backed public reproduction asset is currently recorded.