SPROUT: AI-based seedling emergence PRedictiOn and trait extraction using RGB time-series

Abstract

Early crop establishment strongly influences plant performance and yield, making seedling emergence an important trait in crop phenotyping, breeding, and stress physiology studies. However, emergence monitoring is still commonly performed manually and typically records only the final emergence percentage, limiting the analysis to other dynamic observations. Automated image-based approaches are promising but remain challenging due to the small size of plant structures, heterogeneous soil backgrounds, and variability across imaging systems. Here, we present SPROUT (AI- based S eedling PR edicti O n and trait extraction U sing RGB T ime-series), a low-cost RGB imaging pipeline for automated prediction of crop emergence dynamics and trait extraction. The system integrates instance segmentation, object-detection–based data reduction, and temporal deep learning to estimate the emergence time of individual seedlings from RGB image sequences. The pipeline then automatically reconstructs emergence curves and extracts associated traits, including final emergence percentage, EC50, and emergence synchronicity. SPROUT was developed and evaluated using barley and wheat datasets acquired with different RGB cameras under controlled growth-chamber conditions. In the development and retraining settings, the best-performing TCN model achieved 90.0% per-well accuracy with a ± 2h tolerance, supporting accurate emergence curve reconstruction. In an independent inference-only dataset, the model still captured approximate emergence dynamics, although accuracy decreased to 59.3%, indicating that SPROUT is best used as a modular pipeline that can be retrained or fine-tuned for new crop, camera, or experimental domains. A cadmium-stress case study in two contrasting wheat genotypes showed that SPROUT-derived traits captured genotype-specific establishment strategies associated with growth and metabolic responses.

Plant phenotyping relevance

RGB時系列画像から出芽動態を推定し、出芽率・EC50・同時性などの形質を抽出するパイプラインを開発・評価しており、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 SPROUT emergence-prediction pipeline code is publicly available on GitHub with explicit availability language, and raw images plus morphology/metabolic data are deposited on Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.18889863). The GitHub URL is in allowed_urls; the Zenodo DOI is not, so only the code asset is listed as an ad-