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Digital image processing is widely used in the non-destructive diagnosis of plant nutrition. Previous plant nitrogen diagnostic studies have mostly focused on characteristics of the rice canopy or leaves at some specific points in time, with the long sampling intervals unable to provide detailed and specific “dynamic features.” According to plant growth mechanisms, the dynamic changing rate in leaf shape and color differ between different nitrogen supplements. Therefore, the objective of this study was to diagnose nitrogen stress levels by analyzing the dynamic characteristics of rice leaves. Scanning technology was implemented to collect rice leaf images every 3 days, with the characteristics of the leaves from different leaf positions extracted utilizing MATLAB. Newly developed shape characteristics such as etiolation area (EA) and etiolation degree (ED), in addition to shape (area, perimeter) and color characteristics (green, normalized red index, etc.), were used to quantify the process of leaf change. These characteristics allowed sensitive indices to be established for further model validation. Our results indicate that the changing rates in dynamic characteristics, in particular the shape characteristics of the first incomplete leaf (FIL) and the characteristics of the 3rd leaf (leaf color and etiolation indices), expressed obvious distinctions among different nitrogen treatments. Consequently, we achieved acceptable diagnostic accuracy (training accuracy 77.3%, validation accuracy 64.4%) by using the FIL at six days after leaf emergence, and the new shape characteristics developed in this article (ED and EA) also showed good performance in nitrogen diagnosis. Based on the aforementioned results, dynamic analysis is valuable not only in further studies but also in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]