Background: High throughput non-destructive phenotyping is emerging as a significant approach for phenotyping germplasm and breeding populations for the identification of superior donors, elite lines, and QTLs. Detection and counting of spikes, the grain bearing organs of wheat, is critical for phenomics of a large set of germplasm and breeding lines in controlled and field conditions. It is also required for precision agriculture where the application of nitrogen, water, and other inputs at this critical stage is necessary. Further, counting of spikes is an important measure to determine yield. Digital image analysis and machine learning techniques play an essential role in non-destructive plant phenotyping analysis. Results:In this study, an approach based on computer vision, particularly object detection, to recognize and count the number of spikes of the wheat plant from the digital images is proposed. For spike identification, a novel deeplearning network, SpikeSegNet, has been developed by combining two proposed feature networks: Local Patch extraction Network (LPNet) and Global Mask refinement Network (GMRNet). In LPNet, the contextual and spatial features are learned at the local patch level. The output of LPNet is a segmented mask image, which is further refined at the global level using GMRNet. Visual (RGB) images of 200 wheat plants were captured using LemnaTec imaging system installed at Nanaji Deshmukh Plant Phenomics Centre, ICAR-IARI, New Delhi. The precision, accuracy, and robustness (F 1 score) of the proposed approach for spike segmentation are found to be 99.93%, 99.91%, and 99.91%, respectively. For counting the number of spikes, "analyse particles"-function of imageJ was applied on the output image of the proposed SpikeSegNet model. For spike counting, the average precision, accuracy, and robustness are 99%, 95%, and 97%, respectively. SpikeSegNet approach is tested for robustness with illuminated image dataset, and no significant difference is observed in the segmentation performance. © The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article' s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article' Conclusion: In this study, a new approach called as SpikeSegNet has been proposed based on combined digital image analysis and deep learning techniques. A dedicated deep learning approach has been developed to identify and count spikes in the wheat plants. The performance of the approach demonstrates that SpikeSegNet is an effective and robust approach for spike detection and counting. As detection and counting of wheat spikes are cl...

In this paper, we present a new iris ROI segmentation algorithm using a deep convolutional neural network (NN) to achieve the state-of-the-art segmentation performance on well-known iris image data sets. The authors' model surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art Iris DenseNet framework by applying several strategies, including multi-scale/ multi-orientation training, model training from scratch, and proper hyper-parameterisation of crucial parameters. The proposed PixISegNet consists of an autoencoder which primarily uses long and short skip connections and a stacked hourglass network between encoder and decoder. There is a continuous scale up-down in stacked hourglass networks, which helps in extracting features at multiple scales and robustly segments the iris even in an occluded environment. Furthermore, cross-entropy loss and content loss optimise the proposed model. The content loss considers the high-level features, thus operating at a different scale of abstraction, which compliments the cross-entropy loss, which considers pixel-to-pixel classification loss. Additionally, they have checked the robustness of the proposed network by rotating images to certain degrees with a change in the aspect ratio along with blurring and a change in contrast. Experimental results on the various iris characteristics demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art iris segmentation methods considered in this study. In order to demonstrate the network generalisation, they deploy a very stringent TOTA (i.e. train-once-test-all) strategy. Their proposed method achieves E 1 scores of 0.00672, 0.00916 and 0.00117 on UBIRIS-V2, IIT-D and CASIA V3.0 Interval data sets, respectively. Moreover, such a deep convolutional NN for segmentation when included in an end-to-end iris recognition system with a siamese based matching network will augment the performance of the siamese network.

Computer vision with deep learning is emerging as a significant approach for non-invasive and non-destructive plant phenotyping. Spikes are the reproductive organs of wheat plants. Detection and counting of spikes considered the grain-bearing organ have great importance in the phenomics study of large sets of germplasms. In the present study, we developed an online platform, "Web-SpikeSegNet," based on a deep-learning framework for spike detection and counting from the wheat plant's visual images. The architecture of the Web-SpikeSegNet consists of 2 layers. First Layer, Client-Side Interface Layer, deals with end user's requests and corresponding responses management. In contrast, the second layer, Server Side Application Layer, consists of a spike detection and counting module. The backbone of the spike detection module comprises of deep encoder-decoder network with hourglass network for spike segmentation. The Spike counting module implements the "Analyze Particle" function of imageJ to count the number of spikes. For evaluating the performance of Web-SpikeSegNet, we acquired the wheat plant's visual images, and the satisfactory segmentation performances were obtained as Type I error 0.00159, Type II error 0.0586, Accuracy 99.65%, Precision 99.59% and F 1 score 99.65%. As spike detection and counting in wheat phenotyping are closely related to the yield, Web-SpikeSegNet is a significant step forward in the field of wheat phenotyping and will be very useful to the researchers and students working in the domain. INDEX TERMSComputer vision, deep learning, deep encoder-decoder, hourglass,image analysis, spike detection and counting, Web-SpikeSegNet, wheat I. INTRODUCTION Wheat is one of the major food crops grown yearly on 215 million hectares globally [Wheat in the world CGIAR: https://wheat.org/wheat -in-the-world/]. It supersedes maize and rice in terms of protein sources in lowand middle-income nations. Climate change and associated abiotic stresses are the key factors of yield loss in Wheat. Generic improvement in yield and climate resilience is 8 critical for sustainable food security. One of the key as-9 pects of genetic improvement is the determination of com-10 plex genome × environment × management interactions [1]. 11 High-dimensional plant phenotyping is needed to bridge the 12 genotype-phenotype gap in plant breeding and plant health 13 monitoring in precision farming. Visual imaging is the most

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