Evaluation of cucumber seed germination vigor under salt stress environment based on improved YOLOv8.

Abstract

Seed germination vigor is one of the important indexes reflecting the quality of seeds, and the level of its germination vigor directly affects the crop yield. The traditional manual determination of seed germination vigor is inefficient, subjective, prone to damage the seed structure, cumbersome and with large errors. We carried out a cucumber seed germination experiment under salt stress based on the seed germination phenotype acquisition platform. We obtained image data of cucumber seed germination under salt stress conditions. On the basis of the YOLOv8-n model, the original loss function CIoU_Loss was replaced by ECIOU_Loss, and the Coordinate Attention(CA) mechanism was added to the head network, which helped the model locate and identify the target. The small-target detection head was added, which enhanced the detection accuracy of the tiny target. The precision P, recall R, and mAP of detection of the model improved from the original values of 91.6%, 85.4%, and 91.8% to 96.9%, 97.3%, and 98.9%, respectively. Based on the improved YOLOv8-ECS model, cucumber seeds under different concentrations of salt stress were detected by target detection, cucumber seed germination rate, germination index and other parameters were calculated, the root length of cucumber seeds during germination was extracted and analyzed, and the change characteristics of root length during cucumber seed germination were obtained, and finally the germination activity of cucumber seeds under different concentrations of salt stress was evaluated. This work provides a simple and efficient method for the selection and breeding of salt-tolerant varieties of cucumber.

Plant phenotyping relevance

改良YOLOv8と种子萌发表型采集平台是核心方法贡献，并验证了检测性能、提取根长及萌发相关表型。

Code and data availability

The paper describes a cucumber seed germination image dataset (1,728 images, 500 selected and augmented to 1,000 for YOLOv8-ECS training) and phenotyping analysis, but provides no public repository, deposit, or URL for the dataset, images, annotations, or code. The only availability statement says raw data will be made

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