Active Learning with Gaussian Processes for High Throughput Phenotyping

Abstract

A looming question that must be solved before robotic plant phenotyping capabilities can have significant impact to crop improvement programs is scalability. High Throughput Phenotyping (HTP) uses robotic technologies to analyze crops in order to determine species with favorable traits, however, the current practices rely on exhaustive coverage and data collection from the entire crop field being monitored under the breeding experiment. This works well in relatively small agricultural fields but can not be scaled to the larger ones, thus limiting the progress of genetics research. In this work, we propose an active learning algorithm to enable an autonomous system to collect the most informative samples in order to accurately learn the distribution of phenotypes in the field with the help of a Gaussian Process model. We demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed algorithm compared to the current practices on sorghum phenotype data collection.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物表現型データ収集を効率化する能動学習・ガウス過程アルゴリズムを開発し、ソルガムの表現型データで既存手法と比較評価しており、表現型取得ワークフローが中心である。

Code and data availability

The authors explicitly open-sourced their code repository, simulation environment, and the sorghum phenotype dataset used in this paper, with a public GitHub URL.