High-Throughput 3D Reconstruction of Plant Shoots for Phenotyping

In this paper we report on development and analysis of a high throughput 3D reconstruction set-up for reconstructing cereal plants grown in pots for their phenotypic analysis. We are motivated with the idea of accurate and high-throughput reconstruction of shoots. We have developed a turntable setup for high-throughput and high accuracy 3D reconstruction of plant shoots, where the plants stays stationary and the camera moves on a circular path to take multi-view digital images. The leaves of cereal plants like wheat, barley, corn, etc. are very delicate and their movement during imaging causes errors in the volumetric reconstruction of the shoots. The synchronization of the turntable and camera has been designed by us. A novel and easy to use camera calibration for single axis motion is designed and implemented. Visual hull algorithm has been used for 3D reconstruction. We analyse results of reconstruction for three different modes of image acquisition against ground truth with respect to time taken for imaging and the number of images used. In results we obtain phenotypic quality 3D volumetric reconstruction with an acquisition time of less than a minute per potted plant.