A Low-Cost Photogrammetry System for 3D Plant Modeling and Phenotyping
This provides a low-cost solution for plant phenotyping, particularly for researchers in agriculture, but it is incremental as it applies existing structure-from-motion methods to a new domain.
The researchers tackled the problem of 3D plant modeling and phenotyping by developing a low-cost photogrammetry system, resulting in the ability to compute phenotypic traits like plant height, radius, leaf angles, and convex hull from point clouds, and demonstrating its utility for classifying wheat canopy architectures.
We present an open-source, low-cost photogrammetry system for 3D plant modeling and phenotyping. The system uses a structure-from-motion approach to reconstruct 3D representations of the plants via point clouds. Using wheat as an example, we demonstrate how various phenotypic traits can be computed easily from the point clouds. These include standard measurements such as plant height and radius, as well as features that would be more cumbersome to measure by hand, such as leaf angles and convex hull. We further demonstrate the utility of the system through the investigation of specific metrics that may yield objective classifications of erectophile versus planophile wheat canopy architectures.