New computer vision tools help to assess wheat ear diseases

Abstract

PHENET's Use Case 1 on plant health is validating sensors and imaging methods for the assessment of wheat ear diseases, with two AI-powered applications now reaching proof-of-concept stage. The first, FUSASEYD, addresses Fusarium Head Blight (FHB), a major fungal disease in winter wheat. Using RGB field images and a deep learning instance segmentation model (YOLOv11), the application detects and quantifies FHB symptoms on wheat ears, offering an automated alternative to time-consuming expert visual scoring. GEVES has developed both a PC interface and a smartphone application to visualise model predictions in the field. Validation in French registration trials is planned for the 2026 campaign. A companion article by V. Cadot et al. is currently under review in the Journal of Experimental Botany special issue on Plant Phenomics & Enviromics Across Scales. The second, COYL (Counting Orange and Yellow Larvae), tackles a practical challenge faced by breeders, and rapidly counting wheat blossom midge larvae, both Sitodiplosis mosellana and Contarinia tritici, to characterise variety susceptibility. Using smartphone RGB images and YOLOv-based object detection, the best-performing model achieved high accuracy and successfully distinguished between the two visually similar species. An online counting application has been developed, currently accessible to Walloon Agricultural Research Centre members. The labelled COYL-1 dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19402333 for community use. A companion article by Antoine Deryck et al. is under submission at Plant Phenomics Journal.

Plant phenotyping relevance

RGB画像と深層学習によりコムギ穂の病徴を検出・定量する手法の開発とセンサー／画像手法の検証が中心であり、植物病害表現型の取得に該当する。

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