Automated characterization of flowering dynamics in rice using field-acquired time-series RGB images

BACKGROUND: Flowering (spikelet anthesis) is one of the most important phenotypic characteristics of paddy rice, and researchers expend efforts to observe flowering timing. Observing flowering is very time-consuming and labor-intensive, because it is still visually performed by humans. An image-based method that automatically detects the flowering of paddy rice is highly desirable. However, varying illumination, diversity of appearance of the flowering parts of the panicles, shape deformation, partial occlusion, and complex background make the development of such a method challenging. RESULTS: We developed a method for detecting flowering panicles of rice in RGB images using scale-invariant feature transform descriptors, bag of visual words, and a machine learning method, support vector machine. Applying the method to time-series images, we estimated the number of flowering panicles and the diurnal peak of flowering on each day. The method accurately detected the flowering parts of panicles during the flowering period and quantified the daily and diurnal flowering pattern. CONCLUSIONS: A powerful method for automatically detecting flowering panicles of paddy rice in time-series RGB images taken under natural field conditions is described. The method can automatically count flowering panicles. In application to time-series images, the proposed method can well quantify the daily amount and the diurnal changes of flowering during the flowering period and identify daily peaks of flowering. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13007-015-0047-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.