  In this paper, we investigate estimating emergence and biomass traits from
color images and elevation maps of wheat field plots. We employ a
state-of-the-art deconvolutional network for segmentation and convolutional
architectures, with residual and Inception-like layers, to estimate traits via
high dimensional nonlinear regression. Evaluation was performed on two
different species of wheat, grown in field plots for an experimental plant
breeding study. Our framework achieves satisfactory performance with mean and
standard deviation of absolute difference of 1.05 and 1.40 counts for emergence
and 1.45 and 2.05 for biomass estimation. Our results for counting wheat plants
from field images are better than the accuracy reported for the similar, but
arguably less difficult, task of counting leaves from indoor images of rosette
plants. Our results for biomass estimation, even with a very small dataset,
improve upon all previously proposed approaches in the literature.
