Lincoln's Annotated Spatio-Temporal Strawberry Dataset (LAST-Straw)

Abstract

Automated phenotyping of plants for breeding and plant studies promises to provide quantitative metrics on plant traits at a previously unattainable observation frequency. Developers of tools for performing high-throughput phenotyping are, however, constrained by the availability of relevant datasets on which to perform validation. To this end, we present a spatio-temporal dataset of 3D point clouds of strawberry plants for two varieties, totalling 84 individual point clouds. We additionally demonstrate a phenotyping pipeline on the dataset, illustrating how segmentation, meshing and skeletonisation enable the computation of phenotypic traits or provision of data insights. Benchmarking is provided for the extracted traits against a manually curated baseline. This dataset contributes to the corpus of freely available agricultural/horticultural spatio-temporal data for the development of next-generation phenotyping tools, increasing the number of plant varieties available for research in this field and providing a basis for genuine comparison of new phenotyping methodology.