Image-Based Plant Wilting Estimation

Abstract: Many plants become limp or droop through heat, loss of water, or disease. This is also known as wilting. In this paper, we examine plant wilting caused by bacterial infection. In particular, we want to design a metric for wilting based on images acquired of the plant. A quantifiable wilting metric will be useful in studying bacterial wilt and identifying resistance genes. Since there is no standard way to estimate wilting, it is common to use ad hoc visual scores. This is very subjective and requires expert knowledge of the plants and the disease mechanism. Our solution consists of using various wilting metrics acquired from RGB images of the plants. We also designed several experiments to demonstrate that our metrics are effective at estimating wilting in plants.