A User-Friendly Machine Learning Pipeline for Automated Leaf Segmentation in <i>Atriplex lentiformis</i>

Automated leaf segmentation pipelines must balance accuracy, scalability, and usability to be readily adopted in plant research. We present an end-to-end deep learning pipeline designed for practical use in plant phenotyping, which we developed and evaluated during a real-world plant growth experiment using <i>Atriplex lentiformis</i>. The pipeline integrates a fine-tuned Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN) segmentation model trained on 176 plant images and achieves high performance despite the small training data set (Dice coefficient = 0.781). We quantitatively compare the fine-tuned Mask R-CNN model to Meta AI's Segment Anything Model (SAM) and evaluate natural language prompts using Grounded SAM and the Leaf-Only SAM post-processing pipeline for refining segmentation outputs. Our findings highlight that transfer learning on a specialized data set can still outperform a large foundation model in domain-specific tasks. In addition, we integrate QR codes for automated sample identification and benchmark multiple QR code decoding libraries, evaluating their robustness under real-world imaging conditions like distortion and lighting variation. To ensure accessibility, we deploy the pipeline as a user-friendly Streamlit web application, allowing researchers to analyze images without deep learning expertise. By focusing on practical deployment in addition to model performance, this study provides an open-source, scalable framework for plant science applications and addresses real-world challenges in automation and usability by the end-researcher.