A Novel Tool for Soybean Pods and Branches Recognition by Deep Learning Based Approach
Qize Xie, Hongbo Du, Qing Yang, Zhi Liu, Xin Jin, Chuanfeng Li, Yu Wei, Futong Tang, Peijun Tao, Long YanABSTRACT
Phenotypic trait identification is crucial in cultivating new soybean varieties with high yield and quality. The traditional soybean phenotypic trait identification relies on manual pod counting and plant height measuring with a ruler. The heavy workload causes the data collected by human resources to be extremely prone to error. Therefore, developing an efficient and high‐quality method to obtain phenotypic data of soybean pods and branches is urgently needed. Three network models including ResNet‐101, Swin‐S and ConvNeXt‐S are compared in this study, and the ConvNeXt‐S model is identified as optimal, with a mAP@0.5 of 0.95, which could reach 74.2%. A deep learning–based approach soybean plant phenotype detection and data storage system is developed, including information on plants, pods and branches. The R2 between the number of pods detected by the system and the true value reached 0.995. These results indicate that the system is more accurate and stable than the manual phenotype identification. Our study paves the way for reducing economic and time costs as well as improving phenotype identification efficiency and accuracy in detecting soybean phenotypes.