Image-Based Quality Evaluation of Shipping Stage Tomato Seedlings from Commercial Nurseries

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The growth of seedlings produced from commercial nurseries may be related to early growth after transplanting.Therefore, rapid and objective evaluation of seedlings at the shipping stage is important.However, seedling evaluation in commercial nurseries often depends on visual assessment or requires considerable labor to measure seedling growth, and non-destructive, quantitative evaluation methods are therefore needed.The aim of this study was to evaluate the applicability of image-based measurements of plant height and leaf area in shipping stage of tomato seedlings produced in commercial nurseries and to examine the possibility of rapid and non-destructive evaluation of shoot growth and seedling quality indices using these measurements.Shipping stage tomato seedlings were collected from nine commercial nurseries in Korea, and image-based plant height and leaf area were measured using a Plant Image Measurement System (PIMS).After destructive measurements, seedling growth was evaluated, and the compactness index (CI) and sturdiness quotient (SQ) were calculated.Shipping stage tomato seedlings showed variation among nurseries in 10 growth traits.Image-based plant height and leaf area showed positive linear relationships with the destructive measurements, with R 2 values of 0.7524 and 0.6837, respectively.Regression models using image-based plant height and leaf area showed the highest R 2 for shoot fresh weight (R 2 = 0.642), while the R 2 for shoot dry weight was 0.509.In contrast, the R 2 values for secondary transformed indices SQ and CI were relatively low at 0.407 and 0.312, respectively.These results indicate that image-based plant height and leaf area can be used for the non-destructive evaluation of morphological characteristics and shoot growth in shipping stage tomato seedlings.However, estimation of CI and SQ related to dry matter accumulation and stem diameter may be needed to improve the evaluation accuracy of seedling quality indices.