High-throughput phenotyping of individual plant height in an oilseed rape population based on Mask-RCNN and UAV images

Plant height, a key agronomic trait, affects crop structure, photosynthesis, and thus the final yield and seed quality. The combination of digital cameras on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and use of structure from motion have enabled high-throughput crop canopy height estimation. However, the focus of prior research has mainly been on plot-level height prediction, neglecting precise estimations for individual plants. This study aims to explore the potential of UAV RGB images with mask region-based convolutional neural network (Mask-RCNN) for high-throughput phenotyping of individual-level height (IH) in oilseed rape at different growth stages. Field-measured height (FH) of nine sampling plants in each subplot of the 150 subplots was obtained by manual measurement after the UAV flight. An instance segmentation model for oilseed rape with data augmentation based on the Mask-RCNN model was developed. The IHs were then used to obtain plot-level height based on individual-level height (PHIH). The results show that Mask-RCNN performed better than the conventional Otsu method with the F1 score increased by 60.8% and 26.6% under high and low weed pressure, respectively. The trained model with data augmentation achieved accurate crop height estimation based on overexposed and underexposed UAV images, indicating the model’s applicability in practical scenarios. The PHIH can be predicted with the determination coefficient (r²) of 0.992, root mean square error (RMSE) of 4.03 cm, relative root mean square error (rRMSE) of 7.68%, which outperformed the results in the reported studies, especially in the late bolting stage. The IHs of the whole growth stages of oilseed can be predicted by this method with an r² of 0.983, RMSE of 2.60 cm, and rRMSE of 7.14%. Furthermore, this method enabled a comprehensive Genome-wide association study (GWAS) in a 293-accession genetic population. The GWAS identified 200 and 65 statistically significant single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which were tightly associated with 28 and 11 candidate genes, at the late bolting and flowering stages, respectively. These findings demonstrated that the proposed method is promising for accurate estimations of IHs in oilseed rape as well as exploring the variations within the subplot, thus providing great potential for high-throughput plant phenotyping in crop breeding.