Improved Transformer for Time Series Senescence Root Recognition

The root is an important organ for plants to obtain nutrients and water, and its phenotypic characteristics are closely related to its functions. Deep-learning-based high-throughput in situ root senescence feature extraction has not yet been published. In light of this, this paper suggests a technique based on the transformer neural network for retrieving cotton's in situ root senescence properties. High-resolution in situ root pictures with various levels of senescence are the main subject of the investigation. By comparing the semantic segmentation of the root system by general convolutional neural networks and transformer neural networks, SegFormer-UN (large) achieves the optimal evaluation metrics with mIoU, mRecall, mPrecision, and mF1 metric values of 81.52%, 86.87%, 90.98%, and 88.81%, respectively. The segmentation results indicate more accurate predictions at the connections of root systems in the segmented images. In contrast to 2 algorithms for cotton root senescence extraction based on deep learning and image processing, the in situ root senescence recognition algorithm using the SegFormer-UN model has a parameter count of 5.81 million and operates at a fast speed, approximately 4 min per image. It can accurately identify senescence roots in the image. We propose that the SegFormer-UN model can rapidly and nondestructively identify senescence root in in situ root images, providing important methodological support for efficient crop senescence research.