By monitoring temporal changes in individual growth by UAV-based IPP, we might capture the large-scale dynamics of plant interactions in field conditions. Plants can influence each other either negatively (through competition) or positively (through facilitation). Second, IPP might be able to test plant-plant interactions in field conditions. Compared with genetically uniform crops, wild plants show large genetic variation among individuals, so it is essential to capture the individual variations in phenotyping studies of wild plants or genetically diverse crops. Whereas measurement in a group or plot unit usually provides an average trait value, IPP provides the traits of all individuals and can show trait variations. First, data on individual plants allow us to examine variations within a group or plot. Individual data provided by IPP will broaden the application of UAV-based phenotyping for several reasons. On the other hand, little efforts have been made toward UAV sensing for traits of individually grown plants. To date, UAV sensing has focused mainly on the measurement of plant traits as the values of group or plot units of mass grown plants, such as wheat, rice, and maize.

Field experiments with individually grown plants are ubiquitous in basic and applied plant science, such as typical garden experiments in ecological and evolutionary studies, tree breeding, vegetable cultivation. One crucial technique that remains to be addressed is the development of individual plant phenotyping (IPP).

However, further methodological development is necessary for their use to become common in other fields of plant science (Minervini et al., 2015 Roth et al., 2018). UAV sensing platforms developed for agriculture also can used in genetics, ecology, forestry, and environmental science (Carrasco-Escobar et al., 2019 Christie et al., 2016 Zhang et al., 2016). Proximal sensing through the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is among the most promising and popular techniques for field phenotyping owing to its rapidity, nondestructiveness, cost-effectiveness, and information density (Chapman et al., 2014 Maes & Steppe, 2019 Sankaran et al., 2015 Yang et al., 2017). Recent advances in technical and analytical methods have made high-throughput field phenotyping possible (Furbank & Tester, 2011 Houle et al., 2010 Tardieu et al., 2017 Tripodi et al., 2018). Plant phenotyping involves the comprehensive measurement of the physical and biochemical traits of plant genotypes under specific environmental conditions and provides essential information for the plant sciences. The proposed framework can be applied to either small and large scale phenotyping experiments.The framework demonstrated its utility in the phenotyping of Helianthus tuberosus (Jerusalem artichoke), an herbaceous perennial plant species. Two contributions, which are weed elimination for individual plant segmentation, and complex traits (volume and outline) extraction, have been developed. In this study, we proposed a methodological framework for field-based individual plant phenotyping by UAV.We found two main challenges of phenotyping individual plants in the single grown experiment: plant segmentation from weedy backgrounds and the estimation of complex traits that are difficult to measure manually.Such techniques are now expected to be used for individual level phenotyping in the single grown experiment. Recent advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAVs) and image processing have made high-throughput field phenotyping possible at plot/canopy level in the mass grown experiment.

Pro vehicle outlines 2010