Determination of Wheat Growth Stages Using Image Sequences and Deep Learning

The growth stage of wheat is key information for critical decision-making related to cultivar screening of wheat and farming activities. In order to solve the problem that it is difficult to determine the growth stages of a large number of wheat breeding materials grown in an artificial climate room accurately and quickly, the first attempt was made to determine the growth stages of wheat using image sequences of growth and development. A hybrid model (DenseNet–BiLSTM) based on the DenseNet and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory was proposed for determining the growth stage of wheat. The spatiotemporal characteristics of wheat growth and development were modeled by DenseNet–BiLSTM synthetically to classify the growth stage of each wheat image in the sequence. The determination accuracy of the growth stages obtained by the proposed DenseNet–BiLSTM model was 98.43%. Of these, the determination precisions of the tillering, re-greening, jointing, booting, and heading period were 100%, 97.80%, 97.80%, 85.71%, and 95.65%, respectively. In addition, the accurate determination of the growth stages and further analysis of its relationship with meteorological conditions will help biologists, geneticists, and breeders to breed, screen, and evaluate wheat varieties with ecological adaptability.