High-throughput volumetric reconstruction for 3D wheat plant architecture studies

• Main Authors: Wei Fang, Hui Feng, Wanneng Yang, Lingfeng Duan, Guoxing Chen, Lizhong Xiong, Qian Liu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: World Scientific Publishing 2016-09-01
• Series: Journal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences
• Subjects: Three-dimensional; volumetric reconstruction; plant architecture; graphics processing unit; high-throughput
• Online Access: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/S1793545816500371

For many tiller crops, the plant architecture (PA), including the plant fresh weight, plant height, number of tillers, tiller angle and stem diameter, significantly affects the grain yield. In this study, we propose a method based on volumetric reconstruction for high-throughput three-dimensional (3D) wheat PA studies. The proposed methodology involves plant volumetric reconstruction from multiple images, plant model processing and phenotypic parameter estimation and analysis. This study was performed on 80 Triticum aestivum plants, and the results were analyzed. Comparing the automated measurements with manual measurements, the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) in the plant height and the plant fresh weight was 2.71% (1.08cm with an average plant height of 40.07cm) and 10.06% (1.41g with an average plant fresh weight of 14.06g), respectively. The root mean square error (RMSE) was 1.37cm and 1.79g for the plant height and plant fresh weight, respectively. The correlation coefficients were 0.95 and 0.96 for the plant height and plant fresh weight, respectively. Additionally, the proposed methodology, including plant reconstruction, model processing and trait extraction, required only approximately 20s on average per plant using parallel computing on a graphics processing unit (GPU), demonstrating that the methodology would be valuable for a high-throughput phenotyping platform.