Automatic preprocessing pipeline for individual-plant level (IPL) soybean growth monitoring through UAV multisource imagery.

Abstract

Orthoimagery derived from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has become a valuable data source for crop-growth monitoring. Individual plant-level (IPL) information enables high-throughput analyses by capturing plant-to-plant variability within fields. However, reliable IPL-based analysis requires accurate extraction of plant-specific regions, which remains challenging in soybean cultivation due to weed interference and canopy overlap. This study proposed an automatic preprocessing framework for IPL soybean growth monitoring that integrates deep-learning-based semantic segmentation with a furrow-guided region of interest (ROI) generation strategy using UAV imagery. A segmentation model was developed using combinations of RGB and multispectral orthoimagery, and a furrow line detection algorithm was designed to generate IPL ROIs aligned with crop rows. The ensemble model combining U-Net, DeepLabV3+, and SegFormer achieved the most stable performance (F1-score up to 0.94 and IoU up to 0.89). The furrow-guided ROI generation algorithm also accurately estimated crop counts, showing strong agreement with manual observations (R² = 0.90 and RMSE = 6.35). The generated IPL ROIs enabled accurate quantification of growth-related features, with strong agreement between automatically generated and manually delineated ROIs (R² > 0.90). Overall, the proposed preprocessing framework provides a practical and scalable solution for UAV-based high-throughput phenotyping in soybean and other ridge-based cropping systems.

Code and data availability

The authors state that the complete implementation of their IPL soybean preprocessing pipeline (semantic segmentation + furrow line detection) is publicly available on Zenodo. The annotated sample dataset, however, is only available upon request from the corresponding author, so it is not a public asset.