Highlights Improved nodule separability in homogeneous backgrounds via dual-domain encoding. Reduced small-nodule misses with multi-scale feature aggregation gating. Split adhered nodules using geometry-aware distance-field regression. Delivered an app and expert agent for nodule counting and advice. ABSTRACT. Peanut nodule phenotyping provides an important basis for assessing symbiotic N fixation potential and guiding cultivation management. However, root images often exhibit high texture similarity between nodules and roots, with small-scale targets co-existing with dense occlusion clusters, which allows segmentation errors to accumulate along the counting pipeline and manifest as systematic bias. To address key bottlenecks, insufficient separability in homogeneous backgrounds, missed detections of small-scale nodules, and under-segmentation in dense scenes, this study proposed a Root Nodule Morphology-Prior Mamba Segmentation Network (NMP-Mamba). Specifically, Dual-Domain Spatial-Frequency Encoder (DSFE) was introduced to enhance discriminative representations between nodules and roots under texture-homogeneous conditions; Multi-scale Feature Aggregation Gating (MFAG) was incorporated to strengthen small-target responses and aggregate multi-scale features; and Geometry-Aware Distance-Field Regression (GADR) was employed to provide more stable splitting cues in dense occlusion regions. Experiments demonstrated that NMP-Mamba achieved consistent advantages in both segmentation and counting (Dice 95.35%, Nodule IoU 91.11%, MAE 5.33) while maintaining 51.6 FPS; ablation analyses further verified the complementary contributions of the components to counting-regression agreement and error-variance control. In addition, an end-cloud collaborative nodule diagnosis APP was built upon the model, with the predicted masks and phenotypic indicators packaged as structured inputs to an agriculture-oriented Expert Agent, enabling an end-to-end workflow from image segmentation and phenotypic quantification to diagnostic text and management recommendations and providing intuitive reference and assistance for nodule counting and phenotyping. Keywords: Intelligent Agent, Mamba, Root nodules, Semantic segmentation.
Hu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.