Baret Frederic

French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) | INRAE · Environnement Méditerranéen et Modélisation des Agro-Hydrosystèmes (EMMAH)

Data competitions have become a popular approach to crowdsource new data analysis methods for general and specialized data science problems. Data competitions have a rich history in plant phenotyping, and new outdoor field datasets have the potential to embrace solutions across research and commercial applications. We developed the Global Wheat Cha...

Applying deep learning to images of cropping systems provides new knowledge and insights in research and commercial applications. Semantic segmentation or pixel-wise classification, of RGB images acquired at the ground level, into vegetation and background is a critical step in the estimation of several canopy traits. Current state of the art metho...

The sowing pattern has an important impact on light interception efficiency in maize by determining the spatial distribution of leaves within the canopy. Leaves orientation is an important architectural trait determining maize canopies light interception. Previous studies have indicated how maize genotypes may adapt leaves orientation to avoid mutu...

Leaf area index (LAI) and canopy chlorophyll content (CCC) are important indicators that describe the growth status and nitrogen deficiencies of crops. Several studies have been performed to estimate LAI and CCC using multispectral cameras onboard an unmanned airborne vehicle (UAV) system. However, the impacts of illuminations during UAV flight and...

Head (panicle) density is a major component in understanding crop yield, especially in crops that produce variable numbers of tillers such as sorghum and wheat. Use of panicle density both in plant breeding and in the agronomy scouting of commercial crops typically relies on manual counts observation, which is an inefficient and tedious process. Be...

Pixel segmentation of high-resolution RGB images into chlorophyll-active or nonactive vegetation classes is a first step often required before estimating key traits of interest. We have developed the SegVeg approach for semantic segmentation of RGB images into three classes (background, green, and senescent vegetation). This is achieved in two step...

The objective of this study is to evaluate the performances of a semi-empirical approach based on the Bayesian theory to retrieve Green Area Index (GAI) from multiple decametric satellites. It is designed to overcome some limitations in existing Radiative Transfer Model (RTM) inversion methods, including the high dimensionality of the inverse probl...

The definition of LAI (Leaf Area Index) is important when deriving it from reflectance observation for model application and validation. Canopy reflectance and the corresponding quantities of LAI, PAI (Plant Area Index), GAI (Green Area Index) and effective GAI (GAIeff) are first calculated using a 3D radiative transfer model (RTM) applied to 3D wh...

Full article available : https://spj.sciencemag.org/journals/plantphenomics/2022/9803570/

With the widespread use of high-throughput phenotyping systems, growth process data are expected to become more easily available. By applying genomic prediction to growth data, it will be possible to predict the growth of untested genotypes. Predicting the growth process will be useful for crop breeding, as variability in the growth process has a s...

There is currently a strong societal demand for sustainability, quality, and safety in bread wheat production. To address these challenges, new and innovative knowledge, resources, tools, and methods to facilitate breeding are needed. This starts with the development of high throughput genomic tools including single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) ar...

Multispectral observations from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are currently used for precision agriculture and crop phenotyping applications to monitor a series of traits allowing the characterization of the vegetation status. However, the limited autonomy of UAVs makes the completion of flights difficult when sampling large areas. Increasing the...

With the widespread use of high-throughput phenotyping systems, growth process data are expected to become more easily available. By applying genomic prediction to growth data, it will be possible to predict the growth of untested genotypes. Predicting the growth process will be useful for crop breeding, as variability in the growth process has a s...

The Global Wheat Head Detection (GWHD) dataset was created in 2020 and has assembled 193,634 labelled wheat heads from 4700 RGB images acquired from various acquisition platforms and 7 countries/institutions. With an associated competition hosted in Kaggle, GWHD_2020 has successfully attracted attention from both the computer vision and agricultura...

Plant growth rhythm in structural traits is important for better understanding plant response to the ever-changing environment. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) is a well-suited tool to study structural rhythm under field conditions. Recent studies have used TLS to describe the structural rhythm of trees, but no consistent patterns have been drawn....

Early-stage plant density is an essential trait that determines the fate of a genotype under given environmental conditions and management practices. The use of RGB images taken from UAVs may replace the traditional visual counting in fields with improved throughput, accuracy, and access to plant localization. However, high-resolution images are re...

Several crops bear reproductive organs (RO) at the top of the canopy after the flowering stage, such as ears for wheat, tassels for maize, and heads for sunflowers. RO present specific architecture and optical properties as compared to leaves and stems, which may impact canopy reflectance. This study aims to understand and quantify the influence of...

The canopy bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) plays a pivotal role in estimating the biophysical parameters of plants, whereas soil background anisotropy creates challenges for their retrieval. Soil optical properties affect canopy anisotropic characteristics, especially in open-canopy areas. However, the remote sensing of backg...

Early-stage plant density is an essential trait that determines the fate of a genotype under given environmental conditions and management practices. The use of RGB images taken from UAVs may replace traditional visual counting in fields with improved throughput, accuracy and access to plant localization. However, high-resolution (HR) images are re...

The Global Wheat Head Detection (GWHD) dataset was created in 2020 and has assembled 193,634 labelled wheat heads from 4,700 RGB images acquired from various acquisition platforms and 7 countries/institutions. With an associated competition hosted in Kaggle, GWHD has successfully attracted attention from both the computer vision and agricultural sc...

Data competitions have become a popular approach to crowdsource new data analysis methods for general and specialized data science problems. In plant phenotyping, data competitions have a rich history, and new outdoor field datasets have potential for new data competitions. We developed the Global Wheat Challenge as a generalization competition to...

Plants density is a key information on crop growth. Usually done manually, this task can beneficiate from advances in image analysis technics. Automated detection of individual plants in images is a key step to estimate this density. To develop and evaluate dedicated processing technics, high resolution RGB images were acquired from UAVs during sev...

Canopy light interception determines the amount of energy captured by a crop, and is thus critical to modelling crop growth and yield, and may substantially contribute to the prediction uncertainty of crop growth models (CGMs). We thus analyzed the canopy light interception models of the 26 wheat (Triticum aestivum) CGMs used by the Agricultural Mo...

Continuous and accurate ground measurements of the fraction of absorbed (fAPAR) or intercepted (fIPAR) photosynthetically active radiation by green canopy components is important to monitor canopy functioning. fAPAR and fIPAR are sensitive to illumination conditions and non-green components during the senescence stage. While several methods have be...

Plant phenomics is a new avenue for linking plant genomics and environmental studies, thereby improving plant breeding and management. Remote sensing techniques have improved high-throughput plant phenotyping. However, the accuracy, efficiency, and applicability of three-dimensional (3D) phenotyping are still challenging, especially in field enviro...

Many plant species have distinct optical properties between upper and lower leaf faces. These differences between faces are mainly attributed to the non-homogeneous distribution of absorbing and scattering materials within the leaf depth as well as particular surface features of both epidermises. We proposed the FASPECT model which is an evolution...

The detection of wheat heads in plant images is an important task for estimating pertinent wheat traits including head population density and head characteristics such as health, size, maturity stage, and the presence of awns. Several studies have developed methods for wheat head detection from high-resolution RGB imagery based on machine learning...

Selection of sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.) cultivars that are resistant to Cercospora Leaf Spot (CLS) disease is critical to increase yield. Such selection requires an automatic, fast, and objective method to assess CLS severity on thousands of cultivars in the field. For this purpose, we compare the use of submillimeter scale RGB imagery acquired...

Detection of wheat heads is an important task allowing to estimate pertinent traits including head population density and head characteristics such as sanitary state, size, maturity stage and the presence of awns. Several studies developed methods for wheat head detection from high-resolution RGB imagery. They are based on computer vision and machi...

Data connected to this study can be found at the 4TU Centre for Research Data: https://doi.org/10.4121/uuid:c12affd8-779c-47e4-a93c-ea0afb939237

The Copernicus Global Land Service (CGLS) provides global time series of leaf area index (LAI), fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (fAPAR) and fraction of vegetation cover (fCOVER) data at a resolution of 300 m and a frequency of 10 days. We performed a quality assessment and validation of Version 1 Collection 300 m products t...

The capacity of canopy light interception is a key functional trait to distinguish the phenotypic variation over genotypes. High-throughput phenotyping canopy light interception in the field, therefore, would be of high interests for breeders to increase the efficiency of crop improvement. In this research, the Digital Plant Phenotyping Platform（D3...

A physically based metamodel is proposed to describe the dependency of canopy reflectance on the wavelength, leaf and soil optical properties. The four-stream solution is first applied to describe the interaction between the soil background and the vegetation layers. This leads to the calibration of four terms for a given canopy structure, observat...

Accurate and timely observations of wheat phenology and, particularly, of heading date are instrumental for many scientific and technical domains such as wheat ecophysiology, crop breeding, crop management or precision agriculture. Visual annotation of the heading date in situ is a labour-intensive task that may become prohibitive in scientific and...

The extraction of desirable heritable traits for crop improvement from high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) observations remains challenging. We developed a modeling workflow named "Digital Plant Phenotyping Platform" (D3P), to access crop architectural traits from HTP observations. D3P couples the Architectural model of DEvelopment based on L-systems...

Leaf area index (LAI) is a critical vegetation structural variable and is essential in the feedback of vegetation to the climate system. The advancement of the global Earth Observation has enabled the development of global LAI products and boosted global Earth system modeling studies. This overview provides a comprehensive analysis of LAI field mea...

The dynamics of the Green Leaf Area Index (GLAI) is of great interest for numerous applications such as yield prediction and plant breeding. We present a high-throughput model-assisted method for characterizing GLAI dynamics in maize (Zea mays subsp. mays) using multispectral imagery acquired from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Two trials were c...

Total above-ground biomass at harvest and ear density are two important traits that characterize wheat genotypes. Two experiments were carried out in two different sites where several genotypes were grown under contrasted irrigation and nitrogen treatments. A high spatial resolution RGB camera was used to capture the residual stems standing straigh...

Hardware Software Structural traits Leaf traits Dynamics of traits Conclusion High resolution RGB camera + 6000 x 4000 pixels + Pixel size: 3.93 µm + Focal length: 30-60 mm + Weight: 500 g with lens Footprint 4,2mm Footprint 8mm AIRPHEN multispectral camera + 1080 x 960 pixels + 6 configurable bands + Pixel size: 3.04 µm + Focal length: 4.2-8 mm +...

Forests cover about one third on the Earth’s land surface and provide a number of ecosystem services. Among these, forest ecosystems play an essential role within the global carbon dynamics due to their continuous exchange of CO2 with the atmosphere through photosynthesis. For this reason, understanding and quantifying their imprint on the global c...

VALERI : a network of sites and methodology for the validation of medium spatial resolution land products

Wheat ear density estimation is an appealing trait for plant breeders. Current manual counting is tedious and inefficient. In this study we investigated the potential of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to provide accurate ear density using nadir high spatial resolution RGB images. Two different approaches were investigated, either using the Fa...

Terrestrial ecosystems play an essential role in the carbon cycle as they exchange CO2 with the atmosphere through photosynthesis and respiration, but the exact magnitude of these processes is still largely unknown. The uncertainties in the carbon cycle modeling are related to the inadequate representation of terrestrial photosynthesis, due to an i...

Phenotyping in breeding trials is the basis for the selection of new varieties of food, feed and fibre crops that support the continued growth of world population. In addition to economic yield, breeders measure many phenotypes (also called traits) associated with the adaptation of these crops, such as the time of flowering, the height of the crop...

Surface soil moisture content (SMC) is known to impact soil reflectance at all wavelengths of the solar spectrum. As a consequence, many semi-empirical methods aim at inferring SMC from soil reflectance, but very few rely on physically-based models. This article presents a multilayer radiative transfer model of soil reflectance called MARMIT (multi...

The recent emergence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) has opened a new horizon in vegetation remote sensing, especially for agricultural applications. However, the benefits of UAV centimeter-scale imagery are still unclear compared to coarser resolution data acquired from satellites or aircrafts. This study aims (i) to propose novel methods for re...

Progress in remote sensing and robotic technologies decreases the hardware costs of phenotyping. Here, we first review cost-effective imaging devices and environmental sensors, and present a trade-off between investment and manpower costs. We then discuss the structure of costs in various real-world scenarios. Hand-held low-cost sensors are suitabl...

Land Surface Phenology (LSP) and Leaf Area Index (LAI) are important variables that describe the photosynthetically active phase and capacity of vegetation. Both are derived on the global scale from optical satellite sensors and require robust validation based on in situ sensors at high temporal resolution. This study assesses the PAI Autonomous Sy...

Leaf rolling in maize crops is one of the main plant reactions to water stress that can be visually scored in the field. However, leaf-scoring techniques do not meet the high-throughput requirements needed by breeders for efficient phenotyping. Consequently, this study investigated the relationship between leaf-rolling scores and changes in canopy...