Leaf-GP: an open and automated software application for measuring growth phenotypes for arabidopsis and wheat

Abstract

Leaf-GP is a sophisticated software application that provides three approaches to quantify growth phenotypes from large image series. We demonstrate its usefulness and high accuracy based on two biological applications: (1) the quantification of growth traits for <i>Arabidopsis</i> genotypes under two temperature conditions; and (2) measuring wheat growth in the glasshouse over time. The software is easy-to-use and cross-platform, which can be executed on Mac OS, Windows and HPC, with open Python-based scientific libraries preinstalled. Our work presents the advancement of how to integrate computer vision, image analysis, machine learning and software engineering in plant phenomics software implementation. To serve the plant research community, our modulated source code, detailed comments, executables (.exe for Windows; .app for Mac), and experimental results are freely available at https://github.com/Crop-Phenomics-Group/Leaf-GP/releases.