Segment Anything for comprehensive analysis of grapevine cluster architecture and berry properties
This work addresses the need for scalable and accurate evaluation of grape cluster traits for viticulture, though it is incremental as it applies an existing foundation model to a new domain.
The study tackled the problem of analyzing grapevine cluster architecture and berry properties by applying the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to segment individual berries in 2D cluster images, achieving a strong correlation with human-identified berries (Pearson r2=0.96) and generating over 150,000 berry masks from 3,500 images.
Grape cluster architecture and compactness are complex traits influencing disease susceptibility, fruit quality, and yield. Evaluation methods for these traits include visual scoring, manual methodologies, and computer vision, with the latter being the most scalable approach. Most of the existing computer vision approaches for processing cluster images often rely on conventional segmentation or machine learning with extensive training and limited generalization. The Segment Anything Model (SAM), a novel foundation model trained on a massive image dataset, enables automated object segmentation without additional training. This study demonstrates out-of-the-box SAM's high accuracy in identifying individual berries in 2D cluster images. Using this model, we managed to segment approximately 3,500 cluster images, generating over 150,000 berry masks, each linked with spatial coordinates within their clusters. The correlation between human-identified berries and SAM predictions was very strong (Pearson r2=0.96). Although the visible berry count in images typically underestimates the actual cluster berry count due to visibility issues, we demonstrated that this discrepancy could be adjusted using a linear regression model (adjusted R2=0.87). We emphasized the critical importance of the angle at which the cluster is imaged, noting its substantial effect on berry counts and architecture. We proposed different approaches in which berry location information facilitated the calculation of complex features related to cluster architecture and compactness. Finally, we discussed SAM's potential integration into currently available pipelines for image generation and processing in vineyard conditions.