Fig. 9

The workflow illustrates the steps involved in the phenotyping of early seedling vigor (ESV) in rice. The images (RGB) of the whole plant in three different views were captured through a 12-megapixel Nikon camera and were processed using Image J software. Each of the images taken from one top view and the other two side views was stored in JPEG format. These images were uploaded into Image J and followed by image pre-processing, which includes image cropping, maintaining the threshold level of color intensity and adjustment of brightness, and setting the scale measurements. Image post-processing was involved mainly in selecting the desired portion of the plant area and converting it into a binary scale of color to establish a specific value. The selected portion of the image area was converted from pixels to square millimeters. Following that, the summary of three images (top and two side views) of crop area was used to estimate the whole-plant area (WPA) and expressed in square millimeters. These overall steps of pre- and post-processing of each image were followed to calculate WPA. Other than WPA, the top view image was used for calculating geometric measurements such as convex hull, compactness, caliper length, and eccentricity