Improving sheet-of-light based plant phenotyping with advanced 3-D simulation

Understanding plant growth and analyzing plant interaction with the environment is an important aspect in modern agronomy and biological sciences. While measurements are often taken at field scale, current research focuses increasingly on individual plants. As a manual determination of morphological plant parameters is very time-consuming, automatic acquisition methods at high throughput are required. Optical scanning methods provide fast acquisition of surface points. However, as plants represent geometrically complex objects, planning a proper measurement setup and evaluation of the acquired data is a challenging task. This paper addresses solutions for system desing and data processing for the sheet-of-light measurement method. As an example implementation a 3D scanning system for individual plants is presented, which is amended by color images for high resolution surface and color measurements of individual plants.