High-throughput estimation of yield for individual rice plant using multi-angle RGB imaging

Abstract

Modern breeding technologies are capable of producing hundreds of new varieties daily, so fast, simple and effective methods for screening valuable candidate plant materials are urgently needed. Final yield is a significant agricultural trait in rice breeding. In the screening and evaluation of the rice varieties, measuring and evaluating rice yield is essential. Conventional means of measuring rice yield mainly depend on manual determination, which is tedious, labor-intensive, subjective and error-prone, especially when large-scale plants were to be investigated. This paper presented an in vivo, automatic and high-throughput method to estimate the yield of individual pot-grown rice plant using multi-angle RGB imaging and image analysis. In this work, we demonstrated a new idea of estimating rice yield from projected panicle area, projected area of leaf and stem and fractal dimension. 5-fold cross validation showed that the predictive error was 7.45%. The constructed model achieved promising results on rice plants grown both in-door and out-door. The presented work has the potential of accelerating yield estimation and would be a promising impetus for plant phenomics.