2024 article
Quantifying Visual Differences in Drought Stressed Maize through Reflectance and Data-Driven Analysis
Banerjee, S., Reynolds, J., Taggart, M., Daniele, M. A., Bozkurt, A., & Lobaton, E. (2024, April 30).
open access via doi.org (repository)
Source: ORCID
Added: May 8, 2024
Environmental factors, such as drought-stress, significantly impact maize growth and productivity worldwide. To improve yield and quality, effective strategies for early detection and mitigation of drought-stress in maize are essential. This paper presents a detailed analysis of three imaging trials conducted to detect drought-stress in maize plants using an existing, custom-developed, low cost, high throughput phenotyping platform. We propose a pipeline for early detection of water stress in maize plants using a Vision Transformer classifier and analysis of distributions of near-infrared (NIR) reflectance from the plants. We also explored suitable regions on the plant that are more sensitive to drought-stress and show that the region surrounding the youngest expanding leaf (YEL) and the stem can be used as a more consistent alternative to analysis involving just the YEL. Our results show good separation between well-watered and drought-stressed trials for two out of the three imaging trials both in terms of classification accuracy from data-driven features as well as through analysis of histograms of NIR reflectance.