Abstract
Multi-plant imaging using arrays of low-cost cameras is a successful
strategy for capturing affordable high-throughput plant phenotyping
data. An imaging platform of this type can enable simultaneous imaging
of hundreds to thousands of plants. The resulting datasets enable
analysis of dynamic plant growth, development, and environmental
responses at high temporal resolution. Full analysis of these datasets
requires the identification of individual plants for measurement, but
computational separation of individual plants becomes challenging when
neighboring plants overlap. Here, we introduce the use of the watershed
transform to segment moderately overlapping plants in multi-plant time
series datasets. Rather than focusing on segmenting plants in individual
images, we utilize information encoded in the entire time series to
propagate plant labels from an early time point when individual plants
are separate to later time points. In preliminary studies, using this
method allowed us increase the analyzable size of the dataset by 28%.