ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.

Sec. Technical Advances in Plant Science

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1378958

GrotUNet: A Novel Leaf Segmentation Method

Provisionally accepted
Hongfei  DengHongfei Deng1*Bin  WenBin Wen2*Cheng  GuCheng Gu2Yingjie  FanYingjie Fan2
  • 1Key Laboratory of Ethnic Education Informatization, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, China
  • 2School of Information Science, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

In the field of biology, the current leaf segmentation method still has problems such as missed inspections and duplication in the number of large, dense, mutual obstruction and vague division tasks. The reason for the above is that image semantic extraction is not satisfactory and semantic parsing is still insufficient. To address the above problems, this paper proposes GrotUNet, a novel leaf segmentation method that can be trained end-to-end. The algorithm is reconstructed in three aspects: semantic feature coding, hopping connectivity, and multiscale upsampling fusion. The semantic coding structure consists of GRblock, WGRblock, and OTblock modules. The former two make full use of the design ideas of GoogLeNet parallel branching and Resnet residual connectivity, while the latter further mines the fine-grained semantic information distributed in the feature space on the feature map after extraction by the WGRblock module to make the feature expression richer. Unlike UNet++ dense connectivity, jump connection reconstruction only uses 1 × 1 convolution for feature fusion of feature maps from different network hierarchies to enrich the semantic information at each location in the space. The multi-scale upsampling fusion design mechanism incorporates higher-order feature maps into each shallow decoding sub-network, effectively mitigating the loss of semantic parsing information of feature maps. In this paper, the method is fully demonstrated on CVPPP, KOMATSUNA and MSU-PID datasets. The experimental results show that GrotUNet segmentation outperforms existential UNet, ResUNet, UNet++, Perspective + UNet and other methods. Compared with UNet++, GrotUNet improves the key evaluation metrics (SBD) by 0.57%, 0.30%, and 0.27%, respectively.

Keywords: Instance segmentation, Feature Coding, Jump connection, Multi-scale fusion, GoogLeNet

Received: 30 Jan 2024; Accepted: 11 Jun 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Deng, Wen, Gu and Fan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence:
Hongfei Deng, Key Laboratory of Ethnic Education Informatization, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, China
Bin Wen, School of Information Science, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, China

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.