ROOTQUANT: AUTOMATED ROOT TRAIT QUANTIFICATION FROMMINIRHIZOTRON IMAGES USING DEEP LEARNING

Abstract

AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWQuantifying root traits such as root length (RL) and root surface area (RSA) from minirhizotron imagery is a valuable approach for overcoming the phenotyping bottleneck that limits understanding and improvement of crop productivity, resource use efficiency and resilience in field experiments. However, current approaches remain labor-intensive, and deep learning (DL) methods suffer from limited generalization ability. We present RootQuant, an end-to-end DL model that simultaneously predicts RL and RSA directly from minirhizotron images using only whole-image trait values as supervision, thereby eliminating the need for pixel-level annotations. The models generalization ability was evaluated across species and fine-tuning configurations. The practical applicability of the model was further assessed under field conditions by converting image-derived RL estimates into volumetric root length density (vRLD). Using 118,191 maize and soybean images collected between 2009 and 2020, RootQuant trained on both species achieved an R2 of 0.90 and an RMSE of 2.9 mm for RL, and an R2 of 0.88 and an RMSE of 4.2 mm2 for RSA. The same mixed-species model generalized strongly across species, yielding an 8% relative improvement in R2 and a 30% lower RMSE on maize compared with the same architecture trained on a single species and applied zero-shot. Image-derived RL predictions converted to vRLD showed the expected depth-dependent decline in vRLD, as was also found by coincident destructive quantification of roots washed out of soil cores. By providing a generalist backbone model trained on a large dataset from two major crop species, RootQuant enables high-throughput simultaneous estimation of two relevant root traits directly from raw imagery without task-specific fine-tuning, thereby accelerating in situ root system analysis and phenotyping applications.