Phenological growth stages of Finger millet (Eleusine coracana (L.)) using 3-D phenotyping with relevance to breeding applications

Abstract

Finger millet ( Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaertn.) is a small seeded cereal known for its health benefits and its ability to grow in water-limited and saline environments. Despite its health and adaptation advantages, there is no standardized BBCH scale developed for finger millet, precluding standardization of a defined growth and development scale. The initial step in any breeding program and related research, is the precise, consistent and standardized description of crop growth stages. Therefore, we present a standardized phenological scale to describe and compare different stages of growth and development. In this study, we used four-finger millet accessions from the U.S.D.A. National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS) collection. Using a standardized BBCH chart as the baseline, we describe nine main stages of development to provide a simplified and user-friendly phenological growth staging scale for finger millet. A novel feature of this study was the use of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to generate three-dimensional (3-D) renderings that align growth stages with 3-D imaging, paving the way for future phenological staging studies to incorporate 3-D visualization as a tool for standardization, researcher training, and reduction of observer bias across environments.

Plant phenotyping relevance

指のキビの生育段階を標準化する手法を開発し、NeRFによる3D画像化を生育ステージ判定・標準化に組み込んでいるため、植物フェノタイピング手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper describes 2-D/3-D imaging, NeRF reconstructions, and a BBCH-based phenological scale for finger millet, but provides no public repository, dataset, code, or model deposit. The Data Availability Statement only promises raw data from the authors on request, and no authors' public URL is given.

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