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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Technical Advances in Plant Science
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2024.1459968
This article is part of the Research Topic Leveraging Phenotyping and Crop Modeling in Smart Agriculture View all 13 articles

An Integrated Method for Phenotypic Analysis of Wheat based on multi-view image sequences: From Seedling to Grain Filling Stages

Provisionally accepted
Shengxuan Sun Shengxuan Sun 1Zhu Yeping Zhu Yeping 1Shengping Liu Shengping Liu 1Yongkuai Chen Yongkuai Chen 2*Yihan Zhang Yihan Zhang 3*Shijuan Li Shijuan Li 1*
  • 1 Agricultural Information Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Haidian, China
  • 2 Institute of Digital Agriculture, Fujian Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Fuzhou, China
  • 3 College of Letters and Science, University of California, Davis, Davis, California, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Wheat exhibits complex characteristics during its growth, such as extensive tillering, slender and soft leaves, and severe organ cross-obscuration, posing a considerable challenge in full-cycle phenotypic monitoring. To address this, this study presents a synthesized method based on SFM-MVS (Structure-from-Motion, Multi-View Stereo) processing for handling and segmenting wheat point clouds, covering the entire growth cycle from seedling to grain filling stages. First, a multi-view image acquisition platform was constructed to capture image sequences of wheat plants, and dense point clouds were generated using SFM-MVS technology. High-quality dense point clouds were produced by implementing improved Euclidean clustering combined with centroids, color filtering, and statistical filtering methods. Subsequently, the segmentation of wheat plant stems and leaves was performed using the region growth segmentation algorithm. Although segmentation performance was suboptimal during the tillering, jointing, and booting stages due to the glut leaves and severe overlap, there was a salient improvement in wheat leaf segmentation efficiency over the entire growth cycle. Finally, phenotypic parameters were analyzed across different growth stages, comparing automated measurements of plant height, leaf length, and leaf width with actual measurements. The results demonstrated coefficients of determination (𝑅 2 ) of 0.9979, 0.9977, and 0.995; root mean square errors (RMSE) of 1.0773 cm, 0.2612 cm, and 0.0335 cm; and relative root mean square errors (RRMSE) of 2.1858%, 1.7483%, and 2.8462%, respectively. These results validate the reliability and accuracy of our proposed workflow in processing wheat point clouds and automatically extracting plant height, leaf length, and leaf width, indicating that our 3D reconstructed wheat model achieves high precision and can quickly, accurately, and non-destructively extract phenotypic parameters. Additionally, plant height, convex hull volume, plant surface area, and Crown area were extracted, providing a detailed analysis of dynamic changes in wheat throughout its growth cycle. ANOVA was conducted across different cultivars, accurately revealing significant differences at various growth stages. This study proposes a convenient, rapid, and quantitative

    Keywords: Wheat plant, Multi-view stereo reconstruction, Phenotype analysis, point cloud processing, Growth dynamics analysis

    Received: 05 Jul 2024; Accepted: 29 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Sun, Yeping, Liu, Chen, Zhang and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Yongkuai Chen, Institute of Digital Agriculture, Fujian Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Fuzhou, China
    Yihan Zhang, College of Letters and Science, University of California, Davis, Davis, 95616, California, United States
    Shijuan Li, Agricultural Information Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Haidian, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.