Accurate Multi-View Stereo 3D Reconstruction for Cost-Effective Plant Phenotyping

Phenotyping, which underpins much of plant biology and breeding, involves the measurement of characteristics or traits. Traditionally, this has been often destructive and/or subjective but the dynamic objective measurement of traits as they change in response to genetic mutation or environmental influences is an important goal. 3-D imaging technologies are increasingly incorporated into mass produced consumer goods (3D laser scanning, structured light and digital photography) and may represent a cost-effective alternative to current commercial phenotyping platforms. We evaluate their performance, cost and practicability for plant phenotyping and present a 3D reconstruction method for plants from multi-view images acquired with domestic quality cameras. We exploit an efficient Structure-From-Motion followed by stereo matching and depth-map merging processes. Experimental results show that the proposed method is flexible, adaptable and inexpensive, and promising as an generalized groundwork for phenotyping various plant species.