Volume and leaf area calculation of cabbage with a neural network-based instance segmentation

Fruit size and leaf area are important indicators for plant health and are of interest for plant nutrient management, plant protection and harvest. In this research, an image-based method for measuring the fruit volume as well as the leaf area for cabbage is presented. For this purpose, a mask region-based convolutional neural network (Mask R-CNN) was trained to segment the cabbage fruit from the leaves and assign it to the corresponding plant. The results indicated that even with a single camera, the developed method can provide a calculation accuracy of fruit size of 92.6% and an accuracy of leaf area of 89.8% on individual plant level.