Image-Based Plant Wilting Estimation

TL;DR

This paper proposes an image-based method to quantify plant wilting caused by bacterial infection, aiming to provide an objective and standardized metric to study disease resistance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel visual wilting metric derived from RGB images, addressing the lack of standardized, objective measures for plant wilting assessment.

Findings

The proposed metrics effectively estimate plant wilting levels.

Experiments demonstrate the correlation between image-based metrics and wilting severity.

The method offers a potential tool for plant disease research and resistance breeding.

Abstract

Many plants become limp or droop through heat, loss of water, or disease. This is also known as wilting. In this paper, we examine plant wilting caused by bacterial infection. In particular, we want to design a metric for wilting based on images acquired of the plant. A quantifiable wilting metric will be useful in studying bacterial wilt and identifying resistance genes. Since there is no standard way to estimate wilting, it is common to use ad hoc visual scores. This is very subjective and requires expert knowledge of the plants and the disease mechanism. Our solution consists of using various wilting metrics acquired from RGB images of the plants. We also designed several experiments to demonstrate that our metrics are effective at estimating wilting in plants.