Tracking Growth and Decay of Plant Roots in Minirhizotron Images

Alexander Gillert, Bo Peters, Uwe Freiherr von Lukas, Jürgen Kreyling, Gesche Blume-Werry; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023, pp. 3699-3708

Abstract

Plant roots are difficult to monitor and study since they are hidden belowground. Minirhizotrons offer an in-situ monitoring solution but their widespread adoption is still limited by the capabilities of automatic analysis methods. These capabilities so far consist only of estimating a single number (total root length) per image.\nWe propose a method for a more fine-grained analysis which estimates the root turnover, i.e. the amount of root growth and decay between two minirhizotron images. It consists of a neural network that computes which roots are visible in both images and is trained in an unsupervised manner without additional annotations.\nOur code is available as a part of an analysis tool with a user interface ready to be used by ecologists.

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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Gillert_2023_WACV, author = {Gillert, Alexander and Peters, Bo and von Lukas, Uwe Freiherr and Kreyling, J\"urgen and Blume-Werry, Gesche}, title = {Tracking Growth and Decay of Plant Roots in Minirhizotron Images}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)}, month = {January}, year = {2023}, pages = {3699-3708} }