Quantifying Crop Disease Trait Dynamics through Longitudinal Imaging and Temporal Analytics
Reliable and objective phenotyping is essential for plant breeding programs to characterize genetic variation and accelerate crop improvement. Conventional disease assessment relies on expert visual scoring, which is labor-intensive, subjective, and prone to inter- and intra-rater variability. Although image-based phenotyping methods have been proposed, many require manual intervention, specialized imaging setups, or single time-point measurements, limiting their ability to capture disease progression over time. Here, we present a pipeline for longitudinal plant disease phenotyping that quantifies wheat stripe rust and leaf rust progression from time-series images. The pipeline performs semi-automated leaf and automated pustule segmentation from images acquired in situ, enabling objective disease severity estimation with minimal user intervention and without requiring solid backgrounds or manual leaf manipulation or detachment. By extracting temporal traits, including disease severity trajectories and standardized area under the disease progress curve, the method provides a comprehensive characterization of disease development throughout infection. Association between automated and expert assessments was moderate for stripe rust (R2 = 0.58) and strong for leaf rust (R2 = 0.85), while expert inter-rater reliability was moderate for both diseases (ICC = 0.675 and 0.800, respectively). The proposed approach establishes a scalable and reproducible framework for longitudinal disease phenotyping in controlled environments, with broad applications in disease resistance screening and crop breeding.