Fig. 1

Challenges of root system architecture reconstruction. Left, an image of Arabidopsis seedlings with a developed architecture, observed in a petri dish. A When observed in 2D, these root systems exhibit numerous root crossings, which induce possible root tracking errors, and can even fool experts when annotating static images without a “temporal insight.” In addition, multiple roots can follow each other for an arbitrarily long time (B), making them hard to disentangle. Finally, second-order roots sometimes hide below the primary root (C), and roots from two adjacent plants could cross (D). These points are severe issues for static reconstruction algorithms and greedy reconstruction processes, requiring addressing this problem with a 2D + t global algorithm