Automated Drought-Stress Assessment in Lettuce: A Detection-Guided Segmentation Approach for Multi-Plant RGB Imagery

Accurate and non-destructive assessment of drought stress is important for improving lettuce production and supporting timely crop management. This study presents a detection-guided deep learning framework for plant-level drought-stress assessment in hydroponically grown lettuce using bird’s-eye-view RGB images. The study further investigates whether canopy segmentation can improve classification performance by reducing irrelevant background information. The framework was evaluated using 2190 images collected across three independent cultivation cycles in which drought stress was induced by isolating the plant root zones from the nutrient solution. In the first stage, YOLO-based object detection was used to localize individual plants, with YOLO26m achieving the highest detection performance of 99.4% [email protected]. The detected regions were subsequently used as spatial prompts for zero-shot canopy segmentation using the Segment Anything Model (SAM), with SAM ViT-B achieving a mean IoU of 0.9864. Six convolutional, transformer-based, and hybrid classification architectures were then evaluated independently using YOLO-cropped and SAM-segmented plant images. Segmented inputs consistently improved classification performance, with MaxViT-S achieving the highest binary test accuracy of 96.3%. The framework further distinguished time-defined pre-stress, early-stress, and late-stress periods with an accuracy of 92.4%. Plant-level generalization was further assessed using six-fold leave-one-plant-out cross-validation, resulting in a mean test accuracy of 90.25 ± 1.78% on unseen plants. These findings demonstrate that RGB-based plant-level analysis can support non-destructive drought-stress assessment and that canopy segmentation improves classification by reducing background influence.