An affordable stereoscopic camera array system for capturing real-time 3D responses to vegetation dense environments

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

To feed our growing global population, the productivity of staple crops will require an increase in yields of ca. 60% by 2050. Realisation of this significant challenge is currently hampered by insufficient capacity of the plant science and Agri-Tech communities to analyse existing plant genetic resources for their interaction with the environment. Plant phenotyping is an emerging science that links genomics with plant ecophysiology and agronomy. The collection of architectural traits of a plant throughout the life cycle (the phenotype) is a result of dynamic interactions between the genetic background (the genotype) and the physical world in which the plant develops (the environment). These interactions determine plant performance and productivity measured as accumulated biomass and commercial yield, and resource use efficiency. A critical parameter of a plant's phenotype is the shape in three dimensions - the plant architecture - which reflects the adaption of a plant to environmental conditions, such as light quantity and quality, and temperature. We will bring together plant scientists, and image capture and machine vision experts to develop an affordable and user-friendly system for progressing on one of the most important issues in biology, our capacity to enhance the productivity of plants. We will combine a robust photometric stereo approach with software using optimised learning algorithms that will produce standardised outputs that can be readily integrated across scales with other biological data sets.