Abstract
High resolution phenotyping at the level of individual leaves offers fine-grained insights into plant development and stress responses. However, the full potential of accurate leaf tracking over time remains largely unexplored due to the absence of robust tracking methods-particularly for structurally complex crops such as canola. Existing plant-specific tracking methods are typically limited to small-scale species or rely on constrained imaging conditions. In contrast, generic multi-object tracking (MOT) methods are not designed for dynamic biological scenes. Progress in the development of accurate leaf tracking models has also been hindered by a lack of large-scale datasets captured under realistic conditions. In this work, we introduce CanolaTrack, a new benchmark dataset comprising 5,704 RGB images with 31,840 annotated leaf instances spanning the early growth stages of 184 canola plants. To enable accurate leaf tracking over time, we introduce LeafTrackNet, an efficient framework that combines a YOLOv10-based leaf detector with a MobileNetV3-based embedding network. During inference, leaf identities are maintained over time through an embedding-based memory association strategy. LeafTrackNet outperforms both plant-specific trackers and state-of-the-art MOT baselines, achieving a 9% HOTA improvement on CanolaTrack. With our work we provide a new standard for leaf-level tracking under realistic conditions and we provide CanolaTrack - the largest dataset for leaf tracking in agriculture crops, which will contribute to future research in plant phenotyping. Our code and dataset are publicly available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
高分辨率的单叶表型分析为植物发育和压力响应提供了精细的见解。然而，由于缺乏稳健的追踪方法（特别是对于结构复杂的作物如油菜），随着时间推移准确地进行叶片跟踪的全部潜力尚未被充分发掘。现有的特定于植物的跟踪方法通常仅限于小型物种或依赖于受限的成像条件。相比之下，通用多目标跟踪（MOT）方法并未针对动态生物场景设计。由于缺乏在现实条件下捕获的大规模数据集，准确叶片追踪模型的发展也受到了阻碍。 在这项工作中，我们介绍了CanolaTrack，这是一个新的基准数据集，包含5,704张RGB图像和31,840个注释的叶子实例，涵盖了184株油菜植物的早期生长阶段。为了实现在时间上的准确叶片跟踪，我们引入了LeafTrackNet，这是一种高效的框架，结合了一种基于YOLOv10的叶检测器和一种基于MobileNetV3的嵌入式网络。在推断过程中，通过一种基于嵌入式的记忆关联策略，在一段时间内保持叶子的身份信息。LeafTrackNet超越了特定于植物的跟踪器和最先进的MOT基线方法，在CanolaTrack上实现了9%的HOTA改进。我们提供的这项工作为现实条件下叶片级追踪提供了一个新的标准，并提供了CanolaTrack——农业作物中最大的叶片跟踪数据集，这将有助于未来在植物表型研究中的发展。 我们的代码和数据集可以在[此链接]（https://给出URL）公开获取。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13130
