Real-time Measurement, Computing and Visualization of Plant Structure

A method and software tool for measuring and reconstructing small plant in real time was presented. The key of this method lies in the feature points measuring with 3D digitizer and organ templates-based details 3D reconstructing. Firstly, several feature points were selected and measured by using a digitizer from the targeted plant. Then the morphological parameters of this plant could be calculated from these feature points, with its skeleton model was reconstructed in the process of measuring. For a details 3D reconstruction of the plant structure, organ's 3D template was used, which was created by using 3D point cloud data measured from real plant organs, or created with interactive designing. This method has been tested in many plants, including crops and small fruit trees. The experiment results indicated that the proposed method is suitable for real-time measurement and multi-scale structural modeling of small plants.