From Organelle Morphology to Whole-Plant Phenotyping: A Phenotypic Detection Method Based on Deep Learning

Abstract

The analysis of plant phenotype parameters is closely related to breeding, so plant phenotype research has strong practical significance. This paper used deep learning to classify Arabidopsis thaliana from the macro (plant) to the micro level (organelle). First, the multi-output model identifies Arabidopsis accession lines and regression to predict Arabidopsis’s 22-day growth status. The experimental results showed that the model had excellent performance in identifying Arabidopsis lines, and the model’s classification accuracy was 99.92%. The model also had good performance in predicting plant growth status, and the regression prediction of the model root mean square error (RMSE) was 1.536. Next, a new dataset was obtained by increasing the time interval of Arabidopsis images, and the model’s performance was verified at different time intervals. Finally, the model was applied to classify Arabidopsis organelles to verify the model’s generalizability. Research suggested that deep learning will broaden plant phenotype detection methods. Furthermore, this method will facilitate the design and development of a high-throughput information collection platform for plant phenotypes.

Code and data availability

The paper's plant-phenotyping analysis is built on the Arabidopsis thaliana time-series image dataset from Namin et al., which the authors explicitly state is publicly available for download. No author analysis code or trained model is shared.