Work

Early growth vigor monitoring and salt tolerance assessment of cotton based on SDI-YOLO11-seg

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: By precisely quantifying the growth changes of seed radicles and cotyledons over continuous time periods, the impact of saline stress environments on early crop growth can be assessed. However, traditional manual measurements struggle to accurately quantify these indicators continuously. Therefore, we developed a Full-Time Series Crop Growth Vigor Monitoring System. This system captured images of the hydroponic germination process and the soil-based seedling growth process of Xinjiang cotton seeds. We constructed a labeled dataset for identifying the germination process and calculating cotyledon growth. Using the SDI-YOLO11-seg model, we achieved the extraction and quantification of germination rate, emergence rate, radicle length, and cotyledon area over continuous time, validating the feasibility of a rapid, batch-assessment method for early cotton seed growth vigor based on the full-time series monitoring system and deep learning. Building on this, we conducted experiments involving four Xinjiang cotton varieties under hydroponic (germination stage) and soil-based (seedling stage) conditions with six different concentrations of NaCl solution stress. Germination rate, emergence rate, radicle length, and cotyledon area for each variety were measured continuously over time. The results show that the proposed SDI-YOLO11-seg model achieved a mean average precision for bounding boxes at IoU 0.5 (mAPbox50) of 0.961 and for masks (mAPmask50) of 0.937, representing improvements of 0.9% and 6.0% over the baseline YOLO11-seg, respectively. Validation against manual ImageJ measurements yielded coefficients of determination (R²) of 0.970 for radicle length and 0.993 for cotyledon area, confirming high measurement accuracy. Under salt stress concentrations ranging from 0 to 250 mmol/L, Jinken 1565 exhibited the fastest germination rate, the highest final germination rate, and the longest average radicle length, indicating strong salt tolerance during the bud stage. In contrast, Jinken 1775 demonstrated a higher seedling emergence rate, the fastest cotyledon growth rate, and the largest cotyledon area, suggesting excellent salt tolerance during the seedling stage. The Tahe 2 variety exhibited weaker salt tolerance during both the bud and seedling stages compared to the other three varieties. Coefficient of variation analysis further revealed that Jinken 1565 exhibited the most uniform radicle growth under high salt stress during the germination stage, while Jinken 1775 and Xinluzao 64 demonstrated superior uniformity in seedling growth, complementing the mean-based vigor assessment.

Source: Frontiers in Plant Science

DOI: 10.3389/fpls.2026.1905593