SST-MAE: Learning Spectral-Spatio-Temporal Representations from Plant Hyperspectral Time Series to Discover Complex Genotype-Phenotype Relations

Understanding the link between genetic variation and observable traits is key to crop breeding. Hyperspectral imaging captures physiological and biochemical profiles, but current supervised methods require costly trait annotations and treat each observation as a static snapshot, ignoring the temporal dynamics of plant development. We introduce SST-MAE, a self-supervised framework that learns genotype-discriminative representations from plant hyperspectral developmental trajectories, without requiring phenotypic labels. The model learns to reconstruct masked information, capturing multiple growth trajectories. Validated on 194 field-grown lettuce genotypes across eight time points, the frozen encoder serves as a feature extractor for downstream genotype classification. SST-MAE outperforms raw spectral and linear baselines, achieving AUROC > 0.89 for anthocyanin pigmentation SNPs and 0.77 for leaf serration. The learned features are highly label-efficient, attaining near-full performance with only 30–50% of labeled data, offering a scalable pathway toward high-throughput genetic screening from image-based phenotypes.