On the Use of Circadian Cycles to Monitor Individual Young Plants

Abstract

Occlusion is a very common problem in computer vision. The presence of objects seen as overlapped under a camera negatively impacts object recognition, object counting or shape estimation. This problem is especially important in plant imaging because plants are very self-similar objects which produce a lot of self-occlusions. A possible way to disentangle apparent occlusions is to acquire the same scene from different points of view when the object is motionless. Such a realization is not necessary if the objects move themselves under the camera and thus offer different points of view for free. This is the case in plant imagery, since plants have their own natural movements, including the so-called circadian rhythms. We propose to use these movements to solve some self-occlusion problems with a set of simple yet innovative sampling algorithms to monitor the growth of individualized young plants. The proposed sampling methods make it possible to monitor the growth of the individual plants until their overlap is definitive. The gain is significant with an average maximum duration of observation increase from 3 days to more than 10 days by comparison with a sampling method that would stop when the first overlap occurs.

Affordable Phenotyping at the Edge for High-Throughput Detection of Hypersensitive Reaction Involving Cotyledon Loss

“…This system has been presented in previous works [ 5 – 7 ], including in the context of plant abiotic stress studies [ 53 ]. The codes to pilot the acquisition is described and made available in [ 54 ].…”

“…This article contributes in this trend. We focus on the phenotyping system, Phenogrid, that we have developed for plant phenotyping in prebreeding [ 5 – 7 ]. Phenogrid is composed of a network of mini-computers coupled with low-cost cameras gazing plants from top view in growth chambers or greenhouses.…”

“…Such analysis is for instance accessible via the software Growth Data [ 8 ]. Phenogrid was initiated for the monitoring of the early stages of seedling development [ 5 – 7 ] under normal growth conditions or abiotic stresses. At these early stages, seedlings do not overlap and an individual monitoring of the plant is possible.…”