PlantSpecLab: A comprehensive open-source platform for high-throughput plant spectral data processing and phenotypic modeling.

Abstract

High-throughput plant phenotyping with hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is pivotal for accelerating crop improvement to address global food security. Adoption is limited by a data-processing bottleneck, forcing a trade-off between costly, inflexible commercial software and programming-intensive open-source libraries. To overcome this barrier, we developed PlantSpecLab, an open-source, no-code platform that unifies the HSI workflow from image processing to modeling within a single interactive interface. The platform introduces spectrally guided segmentation strategies (Range Averaging, Difference Enhancement) and a spectral Fractional-Order Differencing (FOD) preprocessor to enhance extraction of subtle, physiologically relevant features. Across diverse in-house and public datasets, FOD-preprocessed spectra improved model performance over conventional pipelines, yielding 87.35% accuracy for tomato maturity and R 2 = 0.878 for fruit firmness. In cross-software benchmarks, PlantSpecLab matched the accuracy of ENVI and code-based Python pipelines while reducing end-to-end workflow time by >90% (>80 min to ∼8 min). PlantSpecLab provides a transparent, efficient analytical environment that lowers the technical barrier to HSI analysis. This enables researchers to prioritize biological interpretation while minimizing computational overhead.

Code and data availability

The authors explicitly state the PlantSpecLab source code (the platform used for all phenotyping analyses in the paper) is publicly available on GitHub under an MIT license, with a versioned release archived alongside the data.