This study describes the evaluation of a range of approaches to semantic segmentation of hyperspectral images of sorghum plants, classifying each pixel as either nonplant or belonging to one of the three organ types (leaf, stalk, panicle). While many current methods for segmentation focus on separating plant pixels from background, organ-specific segmentation makes it feasible to measure a wider range of plant properties. Manually scored training data for a set of hyperspectral images collected from a sorghum association population was used to train and evaluate a set of supervised classification models. Many algorithms show acceptable accuracy for this classification task. Algorithms trained on sorghum data are able to accurately classify maize leaves and stalks, but fail to accurately classify maize reproductive organs which are not directly equivalent to sorghum panicles. Trait measurements extracted from semantic segmentation of sorghum organs can be used to identify both genes known to be controlling variation in a previously measured phenotypes (e.g., panicle size and plant height) as well as identify signals for genes controlling traits not previously quantified in this population (e.g., stalk/leaf ratio). Organ level semantic segmentation provides opportunities to identify genes controlling variation in a wide range of morphological phenotypes in sorghum, maize, and other related grain crops.
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This content will become publicly available on June 27, 2025
Quantifying leaf symptoms of sorghum charcoal rot in images of field‐grown plants using deep neural networks
Charcoal rot of sorghum (CRS) is a significant disease affecting sorghum crops, with limited genetic resistance available. The causative agent,Macrophomina phaseolina (Tassi) Goid, is a highly destructive fungal pathogen that targets over 500 plant species globally, including essential staple crops. Utilizing field image data for precise detection and quantification of CRS could greatly assist in the prompt identification and management of affected fields and thereby reduce yield losses. The objective of this work was to implement various machine learning algorithms to evaluate their ability to accurately detect and quantify CRS in red‐green‐blue images of sorghum plants exhibiting symptoms of infection. EfficientNet‐B3 and a fully convolutional network emerged as the top‐performing models for image classification and segmentation tasks, respectively. Among the classification models evaluated, EfficientNet‐B3 demonstrated superior performance, achieving an accuracy of 86.97%, a recall rate of 0.71, and an F1 score of 0.73. Of the segmentation models tested, FCN proved to be the most effective, exhibiting a validation accuracy of 97.76%, a recall rate of 0.68, and an F1 score of 0.66. As the size of the image patches increased, both models’ validation scores increased linearly, and their inference time decreased exponentially. This trend could be attributed to larger patches containing more information, improving model performance, and fewer patches reducing the computational load, thus decreasing inference time. The models, in addition to being immediately useful for breeders and growers of sorghum, advance the domain of automated plant phenotyping and may serve as a foundation for drone‐based or other automated field phenotyping efforts. Additionally, the models presented herein can be accessed through a web‐based application where users can easily analyze their own images.
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- PAR ID:
- 10529619
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society of Agronomy and Crop Science Society of America
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Plant Phenome Journal
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2578-2703
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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