Deepweed: Automated Individual Segmentation and Tracking for Duckweed Lineage Analysis.

Deepweed can track hundreds of individual Wolffia australiana plants simultaneously, reconstructing multi-generation lineage structures from dense populations.

• Why it matters: Current phenotyping tools for duckweeds operate only at the population level, limiting insights into individual growth and lineage dynamics crucial for biotechnological applications.
• What they did: Deepweed employs deep-learning-based instance segmentation and multi-object tracking on time-lapse images to assign persistent identities and infer mother-daughter relationships for individual duckweed fronds.
• The result: The framework outputs lineage graphs, morphological metrics, and growth summaries, enabling analyses of duckweed populations that are inaccessible with existing population-level methods.