ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Technical Advances in Plant Science
Biology-Aware Association for Identity-Consistent Leaf Tracking in Top-Down Plant Phenotyping
- DZ
Dongze Zhou
- CZ
Cong Zhang
Wuhan Polytechnic University, Wuhan, China
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Abstract
Reliable leaf-level trait trajectories require identity-consistent tracking across growth, overlap, and appearance change. We introduce a biology-aware association module combining one appearance cue and three biological/geometric cues: spatial continuity, area-growth plausibility, and lifecycle plausibility. On CanolaTrack, adaptive weighting reduces ID switches from 228 to 126 ± 5 (44.7%; per-plant paired p = 1.6 × 10−5, n = 37) and improves HOTA from 88.17 to 89.69 ± 0.10. Difficulty-stratified analysis shows IDSW reductions across all 12 CanolaTrack strata, averaging 40.0% versus Appearance-only and 45.0% versus LeafTrackNet. External association-only Arabidopsis and KOMATSUNA tests identify clean low-displacement GT-box regimes where centroid matching or Fixed bio-constraints are more reliable than zero-shot adaptive-weight transfer. These results provide an operating-envelope recommendation: adaptive weighting is most useful in dense CanolaTrack-like sequences, whereas Fixed bio-constraints or centroid matching are more reliable in clean low-displacement external regimes.
Summary
Keywords
adaptive weighting, biology-aware association, Brassica napus, Computer Vision, Leaf tracking, multi-object tracking, plant phenotyping, trait trajectory extraction
Received
14 May 2026
Accepted
07 September 2026
Copyright
© 2026 Zhou and Zhang. 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: Dongze Zhou
Disclaimer
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