A stomata classification and detection system in microscope images of maize cultivars

PLoS One. 2021 Oct 25;16(10):e0258679. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0258679. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Plant stomata are essential structures (pores) that control the exchange of gases between plant leaves and the atmosphere, and also they influence plant adaptation to climate through photosynthesis and transpiration stream. Many works in literature aim for a better understanding of these structures and their role in the evolution process and the behavior of plants. Although stomata studies in dicots species have advanced considerably in the past years, even there is not much knowledge about the stomata of cereal grasses. Due to the high morphological variation of stomata traits intra- and inter-species, detecting and classifying stomata automatically becomes challenging. For this reason, in this work, we propose a new system for automatic stomata classification and detection in microscope images for maize cultivars based on transfer learning strategy of different deep convolution neural netwoks (DCNN). Our performed experiments show that our system achieves an approximated accuracy of 97.1% in identifying stomata regions using classifiers based on deep learning features, which figures out as a nearly perfect classification system. As the stomata are responsible for several plant functionalities, this work represents an important advance for maize research, providing an accurate system in replacing the current manual task of categorizing these pores on microscope images. Furthermore, this system can also be a reference for studies using images from different cereal grasses.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Microscopy / methods*
  • Photosynthesis*
  • Plant Leaves / anatomy & histology
  • Plant Leaves / physiology
  • Plant Physiological Phenomena*
  • Plant Stomata / anatomy & histology
  • Plant Stomata / classification*
  • Plant Stomata / physiology
  • Plant Transpiration*
  • Zea mays / anatomy & histology
  • Zea mays / physiology*

Grants and funding

FAF received support of the Brazilian scientific funding agency CNPq through project #408919/2016-7 and São Paulo Research Foundation FAPESP grant #2018/23908-1. JPP received support of the Brazilian scientific funding agency CNPq through project #307066/2017-7. FAF received GPUs as donation from NVIDIA Corporation for his research.