Bringing phenotyping to the farm: an evaluation of 3d reconstruction of plants in outdoor environement

Author

Colliaux, David and Hanappe, Peter

Abstract

Recent reviews have pointed out that data collection and trait extraction is the major bottleneck in plant phenotyping. Several platforms, like PhenoTiki [3], provides Open Source components for an affordable acquisition of plant images. Recent years also emphasized the importance of 3d geometric features to characterize the morphology of plants. We describe the hardware and software components for the acquisition of 3d images and a precise analysis of the plant morphology. The platform distinguishes itself from existing work in that it is designed as an affordable and modular solution that can be used both in the lab and in the field, in either static or mobile configuration. In addition, the plant images are captured with an off-the-shelf camera that combines color from an RGB sensor with depth information from a time-of-flight (TOF) sensor (DepthSense by SoftKinetic).