Plant breeders, scientists, and commercial producers commonly use growth rate as an integrated signal of crop productivity and stress. Plant growth monitoring is often done destructively via growth rate estimation by harvesting plants at different growth stages and simply weighing each individual plant. Within plant breeding and research applications, and more recently in commercial applications, non-destructive growth monitoring is done using computer vision to segment plants in images from the background, either in 2D or 3D, and relating these image-based features to destructive biomass measurements. Recent advancements in machine learning have improved image-based localization and detection of plants, but such techniques are not well suited to make biomass predictions when there is significant self-occlusion or occlusion from neighboring plants, such as those encountered under leafy green production in controlled environment agriculture. To enable prediction of plant biomass under occluded growing conditions, we develop an end-to-end deep learning approach that directly predicts lettuce plant biomass from color and depth image data as provided by a low cost and commercially available sensor. We test the performance of the proposed deep neural network for lettuce production, observing a mean prediction error of 7.3% on a comprehensive test dataset of 864 individuals and substantially outperforming previous work on plant biomass estimation. The modeling approach is robust to the busy and occluded scenes often found in commercial leafy green production and requires only measured mass values for training. We then demonstrate that this level of prediction accuracy allows for rapid, non-destructive detection of changes in biomass accumulation due to experimentally induced stress induction in as little as 2 days. Using this method growers may observe and react to changes in plant-environment interactions in near real time. Moreover, we expect that such a sensitive technique for non-destructive biomass estimation will enable novel research and breeding of improved productivity and yield in response to stress.
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