An opinion on imaging challenges in phenotyping field crops

Almost all the world’s food is grown in open fields, where plant phenotypes can be very different from those observed in greenhouses. Geneticists and agronomists studying food crops routinely detect, measure, and classify a wide variety of phenotypes in fields that contain many visually distinct types of a single crop. Augmenting humans in these tasks by automatically interpreting images raises some important and nontrivial challenges for research in computer vision. Nonetheless, the rewards for overcoming these obstacles could be exceptionally high for today’s 7 billion people, let alone the 9.6 billion projected by 2050 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision). To stimulate dialog between researchers in computer vision and those in genetics and agronomy, we offer our views on three computational challenges that are central to many phenotyping tasks. These are disambiguating one plant from another; assigning an individual plant’s organs to it; and identifying field phenotypes from those shown in archival images. We illustrate these challenges with annotated photographs of maize highlighting the regions of interest. We also describe some of the experimental, logistical, and photographic constraints on image collection and processing. While collecting the data sets needed for algorithmic experiments requires sustained collaboration and funding, the images we show and have posted should allow one to consider the problems, think of possible approaches, and decide on the next steps.