WPDSI: A deep learning method for wheat phenology detection from single-temporal images.

Abstract

Accurate monitoring of wheat phenology is critical for ensuring wheat production. Recent advances in deep learning have enabled the automated detection of wheat phenology in the field. In particular, deep learning models using multi-temporal image series have addressed the challenge of low accuracy in models that only use spatial features by incorporating dynamic aspects of the wheat growth process. However, utilizing multi-temporal image series introduces challenges such as model parameter redundancy, complex inference processes, and difficulties in real-time deployment. To address these issues, this study presents an optimization method for deriving wheat phenology from single-temporal images (WPDSI) that combines knowledge distillation and multi-layer attention transfer. The proposed approach employs knowledge distillation. In this framework, a teacher model extracts spatiotemporal features from multi-temporal image-series and generates soft labels to guide a student model trained on single-temporal images. This reduces model complexity and input data requirements. Multi-layer attention transfer allows the student model to inherit feature representations from multiple layers of the teacher model. This enhances its ability to capture key phenological characteristics and supports interpretability through attention mechanisms. The proposed method achieves an overall accuracy (OA) of 0.927, comparable to models trained on multi-temporal image series. Furthermore, the model demonstrates strong generalization on unseen datasets, enhancing real-time performance and computational efficiency while maintaining high accuracy, providing a practical solution for deriving wheat phenology in the field. The dataset is available at https://github.com/phenology-detection/WPDSI.

Plant phenotyping relevance

小麦の生育ステージを単一時点画像から推定する深層学習手法を開発・評価しており、植物フェノタイピング手法が研究の中心です。

Code and data availability

The paper's wheat phenology image dataset is explicitly stated as publicly available at the authors' GitHub repository (https://github.com/phenology-detection/WPDSI), matching an allowed URL. No separate code availability is stated beyond this repository, so it is treated as the paper-specific public asset.