PanicleNeRF: low-cost, high-precision in-field phenotypingof rice panicles with smartphone
This provides a low-cost solution for in-field rice phenotyping, accelerating breeding efficiency, though it is incremental as it combines existing models like SAM, YOLOv8, and NeRF for a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of high-precision, low-cost 3D reconstruction of rice panicles in natural field conditions using smartphones, achieving an F1 score of 86.9% for segmentation and accurate trait extraction with rRMSE as low as 1.75% for panicle length.
The rice panicle traits significantly influence grain yield, making them a primary target for rice phenotyping studies. However, most existing techniques are limited to controlled indoor environments and difficult to capture the rice panicle traits under natural growth conditions. Here, we developed PanicleNeRF, a novel method that enables high-precision and low-cost reconstruction of rice panicle three-dimensional (3D) models in the field using smartphone. The proposed method combined the large model Segment Anything Model (SAM) and the small model You Only Look Once version 8 (YOLOv8) to achieve high-precision segmentation of rice panicle images. The NeRF technique was then employed for 3D reconstruction using the images with 2D segmentation. Finally, the resulting point clouds are processed to successfully extract panicle traits. The results show that PanicleNeRF effectively addressed the 2D image segmentation task, achieving a mean F1 Score of 86.9% and a mean Intersection over Union (IoU) of 79.8%, with nearly double the boundary overlap (BO) performance compared to YOLOv8. As for point cloud quality, PanicleNeRF significantly outperformed traditional SfM-MVS (structure-from-motion and multi-view stereo) methods, such as COLMAP and Metashape. The panicle length was then accurately extracted with the rRMSE of 2.94% for indica and 1.75% for japonica rice. The panicle volume estimated from 3D point clouds strongly correlated with the grain number (R2 = 0.85 for indica and 0.82 for japonica) and grain mass (0.80 for indica and 0.76 for japonica). This method provides a low-cost solution for high-throughput in-field phenotyping of rice panicles, accelerating the efficiency of rice breeding.