Detection of tomato plant phenotyping traits using YOLOv5-based single stage detectors

Plant phenotyping is the study of complex plant traits to evaluate its status depending on the life-cycle conditions. Often, these evaluations are carried out by human operators, and the accuracy could be biased by their experience and skill, especially when dealing with huge amounts of data produced by high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) platforms. With the rapid development of key enabling technologies, HTP is only made possible by the vast amounts of data made available by computer vision systems. In this scenario, artificial intelligence algorithms play a key role in the automation, standardization, and quantitative analysis of large data. This paper focuses on detecting tomato plants phenotyping traits using single-stage detectors (either stand-alone or ensemble) based on YOLOv5, aiming to effectively identify nodes, fruit, and flowers on a challenging dataset acquired during a stress experiment conducted on multiple tomato genotypes. Results demonstrate that the models achieve relatively high scores, considering the particular challenges of the input images in terms of object size, similarity between objects, and their color.