3D Reconstruction of Plant Leaves for High-Throughput Phenotyping

Abstract

Generating 3D digital representations of plants is indispensable for researchers to gain a detailed understanding of plant dynamics. Emerging high-throughput plant phenotyping techniques can capture plant point clouds that, however, often contain imperfections and make it a changeling task to generate accurate 3D reconstructions. We present an end-to-end pipeline to reconstruct surfaces from point clouds of maize and rice plants. In particular, we propose a two-step clustering approach to accurately segment the points of each individual plant component according to maize and rice properties. We further employ surface fitting and edge fitting to ensure the smoothness of resulting surfaces. Realistic visualization results are obtained through post-processing, including texturing and lighting. Our experimental study has explored the parameter space and demonstrated the effectiveness of our pipeline for high-throughput plant phenotyping.