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Accessing a plant’s 3D geometry has become of significant importance for phenotyping during the last few years. Close-up laser scanning is an established method to acquire 3D plant shapes in real time with high detail, but it is stationary and has high investment costs. 3D reconstruction from images using structure from motion (SfM) and multi-view stereo (MVS) is a flexible cost-effective method, but requires post-processing procedures. The aim of this study is to evaluate the potential measuring accuracy of an SfM- and MVS-based photogrammetric method for the task of organ-level plant phenotyping. For this, reference data are provided by a high-accuracy close-up laser scanner. Using both methods, point clouds of several tomato plants were reconstructed at six following days. The parameters leaf area, main stem height and convex hull of the complete plant were extracted from the 3D point clouds and compared to the reference data regarding accuracy and correlation. These parameters were chosen regarding the demands of current phenotyping scenarios. The study shows that the photogrammetric approach is highly suitable for the presented monitoring scenario, yielding high correlations to the reference measurements. This cost-effective 3D reconstruction method depicts an alternative to an expensive laser scanner in the studied scenarios with potential for automated procedures.

Measuring the 3D shape of plants for phenotyping purposes using active 3D laser scanning devices has become an important field of research. While the acquisition of stem and root structure is mostly straightforward, extensive and non-invasive measuring of the volumetric shape of leaves, i.e., the leaf thickness, is more challenging. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether the leaf thickness is measurable using a high precision industrial laser scanning system. The study comprises a metrological investigation of the accuracy of the laser scanning system with regards to thickness measurements as well as experiments for leaf thickness measurements using several leaves of three different types of crop. The results indicate that although the measuring system is principally able to measure thicknesses of about 74 μm with statistical certainty, the leaf thickness is not measurable accurately. The reason for this can be attributed to the measurable penetration depth of the laser scanner combined with the variation of the angle of incidence. These effects cause systematic uncertainties and significant variations of the derived leaf thickness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, the areal deformation analysis has become an important task in engineering geodesy. Thereby, not only manmade objects are of high interest, also natural objects, like plant organs, are focused more frequently. Thus, the analysis of leaf growth, i. e. the spatial development of the leaf surface, can be seen as a problem of deformation monitoring. In contrast to classical geodetic tasks, the absolute size of the deformation of the leaf surface is small, but usually great compared to the object size. Due to the optical characteristics of leaf surfaces, the point clouds, commonly acquired with high precision close-up laser scanners, provide a point-to-point distance that is small or equal compared to the measurement accuracy. Thus, the point clouds are usually processed and the leaf area is derived from a triangulation-based surface representation (mesh), resulting in a significant uncertainty of area calculation. In this paper, we illustrate the lacks of the mesh-based leaf area calculation. Using high precision gauge blocks as well as a number of tomato leaves, uncertainties of the area derivation are revealed and evaluated. The application of a B-spline approximation illustrates the advantages of an approximation-based approach and introduces the prospect for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accessing a plant's 3D geometry has become of significant importance for phenotyping during the last few years. Close-up laser scanning is an established method to acquire 3D plant shapes in real time with high detail, but it is stationary and has high investment costs. 3D reconstruction from images using structure from motion (SfM) and multi-view stereo (MVS) is a flexible cost-effective method, but requires post-processing procedures. The aim of this study is to evaluate the potential measuring accuracy of an SfM- and MVS-based photogrammetric method for the task of organ-level plant phenotyping. For this, reference data are provided by a high-accuracy close-up laser scanner. Using both methods, point clouds of several tomato plants were reconstructed at six following days. The parameters leaf area, main stem height and convex hull of the complete plant were extracted from the 3D point clouds and compared to the reference data regarding accuracy and correlation. These parameters were chosen regarding the demands of current phenotyping scenarios. The study shows that the photogrammetric approach is highly suitable for the presented monitoring scenario, yielding high correlations to the reference measurements. This cost-effective 3D reconstruction method depicts an alternative to an expensive laser scanner in the studied scenarios with potential for automated procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]