3,603 research outputs found
A model-based approach to recovering the structure of a plant from images
We present a method for recovering the structure of a plant directly from a
small set of widely-spaced images. Structure recovery is more complex than
shape estimation, but the resulting structure estimate is more closely related
to phenotype than is a 3D geometric model. The method we propose is applicable
to a wide variety of plants, but is demonstrated on wheat. Wheat is made up of
thin elements with few identifiable features, making it difficult to analyse
using standard feature matching techniques. Our method instead analyses the
structure of plants using only their silhouettes. We employ a generate-and-test
method, using a database of manually modelled leaves and a model for their
composition to synthesise plausible plant structures which are evaluated
against the images. The method is capable of efficiently recovering accurate
estimates of plant structure in a wide variety of imaging scenarios, with no
manual intervention
Structured Light-Based 3D Reconstruction System for Plants.
Camera-based 3D reconstruction of physical objects is one of the most popular computer vision trends in recent years. Many systems have been built to model different real-world subjects, but there is lack of a completely robust system for plants. This paper presents a full 3D reconstruction system that incorporates both hardware structures (including the proposed structured light system to enhance textures on object surfaces) and software algorithms (including the proposed 3D point cloud registration and plant feature measurement). This paper demonstrates the ability to produce 3D models of whole plants created from multiple pairs of stereo images taken at different viewing angles, without the need to destructively cut away any parts of a plant. The ability to accurately predict phenotyping features, such as the number of leaves, plant height, leaf size and internode distances, is also demonstrated. Experimental results show that, for plants having a range of leaf sizes and a distance between leaves appropriate for the hardware design, the algorithms successfully predict phenotyping features in the target crops, with a recall of 0.97 and a precision of 0.89 for leaf detection and less than a 13-mm error for plant size, leaf size and internode distance
AgriColMap: Aerial-Ground Collaborative 3D Mapping for Precision Farming
The combination of aerial survey capabilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
with targeted intervention abilities of agricultural Unmanned Ground Vehicles
can significantly improve the effectiveness of robotic systems applied to
precision agriculture. In this context, building and updating a common map of
the field is an essential but challenging task. The maps built using robots of
different types show differences in size, resolution and scale, the associated
geolocation data may be inaccurate and biased, while the repetitiveness of both
visual appearance and geometric structures found within agricultural contexts
render classical map merging techniques ineffective. In this paper we propose
AgriColMap, a novel map registration pipeline that leverages a grid-based
multimodal environment representation which includes a vegetation index map and
a Digital Surface Model. We cast the data association problem between maps
built from UAVs and UGVs as a multimodal, large displacement dense optical flow
estimation. The dominant, coherent flows, selected using a voting scheme, are
used as point-to-point correspondences to infer a preliminary non-rigid
alignment between the maps. A final refinement is then performed, by exploiting
only meaningful parts of the registered maps. We evaluate our system using real
world data for 3 fields with different crop species. The results show that our
method outperforms several state of the art map registration and matching
techniques by a large margin, and has a higher tolerance to large initial
misalignments. We release an implementation of the proposed approach along with
the acquired datasets with this paper.Comment: Published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 201
Computer Vision Problems in 3D Plant Phenotyping
In recent years, there has been significant progress in Computer Vision based plant phenotyping (quantitative analysis of biological properties of plants) technologies. Traditional methods of plant phenotyping are destructive, manual and error prone. Due to non-invasiveness and non-contact properties as well as increased accuracy, imaging techniques are becoming state-of-the-art in plant phenotyping. Among several parameters of plant phenotyping, growth analysis is very important for biological inference. Automating the growth analysis can result in accelerating the throughput in crop production. This thesis contributes to the automation of plant growth analysis.
First, we present a novel system for automated and non-invasive/non-contact plant growth measurement. We exploit the recent advancements of sophisticated robotic technologies and near infrared laser scanners to build a 3D imaging system and use state-of-the-art Computer Vision algorithms to fully automate growth measurement. We have set up a gantry robot system having 7 degrees of freedom hanging from the roof of a growth chamber. The payload is a range scanner, which can measure dense depth maps (raw 3D coordinate points in mm) on the surface of an object (the plant). The scanner can be moved around the plant to scan from different viewpoints by programming the robot with a specific trajectory. The sequence of overlapping images can be aligned to obtain a full 3D structure of the plant in raw point cloud format, which can be triangulated to obtain a smooth surface (triangular mesh), enclosing the original plant. We show the capability of the system to capture the well known diurnal pattern of plant growth computed from the surface area and volume of the plant meshes for a number of plant species.
Second, we propose a technique to detect branch junctions in plant point cloud data. We demonstrate that using these junctions as feature points, the correspondence estimation can be formulated as a subgraph matching problem, and better matching results than state-of-the-art can be achieved. Also, this idea removes the requirement of a priori knowledge about rotational angles between adjacent scanning viewpoints imposed by the original registration algorithm for complex plant data. Before, this angle information had to be approximately known.
Third, we present an algorithm to classify partially occluded leaves by their contours. In general, partial contour matching is a NP-hard problem. We propose a suboptimal matching solution and show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art on 3 public leaf datasets. We anticipate using this algorithm to track growing segmented leaves in our plant range data, even when a leaf becomes partially occluded by other plant matter over time.
Finally, we perform some experiments to demonstrate the capability and limitations of the system and highlight the future research directions for Computer Vision based plant phenotyping
3D Scanning System for Automatic High-Resolution Plant Phenotyping
Thin leaves, fine stems, self-occlusion, non-rigid and slowly changing
structures make plants difficult for three-dimensional (3D) scanning and
reconstruction -- two critical steps in automated visual phenotyping. Many
current solutions such as laser scanning, structured light, and multiview
stereo can struggle to acquire usable 3D models because of limitations in
scanning resolution and calibration accuracy. In response, we have developed a
fast, low-cost, 3D scanning platform to image plants on a rotating stage with
two tilting DSLR cameras centred on the plant. This uses new methods of camera
calibration and background removal to achieve high-accuracy 3D reconstruction.
We assessed the system's accuracy using a 3D visual hull reconstruction
algorithm applied on 2 plastic models of dicotyledonous plants, 2 sorghum
plants and 2 wheat plants across different sets of tilt angles. Scan times
ranged from 3 minutes (to capture 72 images using 2 tilt angles), to 30 minutes
(to capture 360 images using 10 tilt angles). The leaf lengths, widths, areas
and perimeters of the plastic models were measured manually and compared to
measurements from the scanning system: results were within 3-4% of each other.
The 3D reconstructions obtained with the scanning system show excellent
geometric agreement with all six plant specimens, even plants with thin leaves
and fine stems.Comment: 8 papes, DICTA 201
Computer Vision Problems in 3D Plant Phenotyping
In recent years, there has been significant progress in Computer Vision based plant phenotyping (quantitative analysis of biological properties of plants) technologies. Traditional methods of plant phenotyping are destructive, manual and error prone. Due to non-invasiveness and non-contact properties as well as increased accuracy, imaging techniques are becoming state-of-the-art in plant phenotyping. Among several parameters of plant phenotyping, growth analysis is very important for biological inference. Automating the growth analysis can result in accelerating the throughput in crop production. This thesis contributes to the automation of plant growth analysis.
First, we present a novel system for automated and non-invasive/non-contact plant growth measurement. We exploit the recent advancements of sophisticated robotic technologies and near infrared laser scanners to build a 3D imaging system and use state-of-the-art Computer Vision algorithms to fully automate growth measurement. We have set up a gantry robot system having 7 degrees of freedom hanging from the roof of a growth chamber. The payload is a range scanner, which can measure dense depth maps (raw 3D coordinate points in mm) on the surface of an object (the plant). The scanner can be moved around the plant to scan from different viewpoints by programming the robot with a specific trajectory. The sequence of overlapping images can be aligned to obtain a full 3D structure of the plant in raw point cloud format, which can be triangulated to obtain a smooth surface (triangular mesh), enclosing the original plant. We show the capability of the system to capture the well known diurnal pattern of plant growth computed from the surface area and volume of the plant meshes for a number of plant species.
Second, we propose a technique to detect branch junctions in plant point cloud data. We demonstrate that using these junctions as feature points, the correspondence estimation can be formulated as a subgraph matching problem, and better matching results than state-of-the-art can be achieved. Also, this idea removes the requirement of a priori knowledge about rotational angles between adjacent scanning viewpoints imposed by the original registration algorithm for complex plant data. Before, this angle information had to be approximately known.
Third, we present an algorithm to classify partially occluded leaves by their contours. In general, partial contour matching is a NP-hard problem. We propose a suboptimal matching solution and show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art on 3 public leaf datasets. We anticipate using this algorithm to track growing segmented leaves in our plant range data, even when a leaf becomes partially occluded by other plant matter over time.
Finally, we perform some experiments to demonstrate the capability and limitations of the system and highlight the future research directions for Computer Vision based plant phenotyping
A Hybrid Cable-Driven Robot for Non-Destructive Leafy Plant Monitoring and Mass Estimation using Structure from Motion
We propose a novel hybrid cable-based robot with manipulator and camera for
high-accuracy, medium-throughput plant monitoring in a vertical hydroponic farm
and, as an example application, demonstrate non-destructive plant mass
estimation. Plant monitoring with high temporal and spatial resolution is
important to both farmers and researchers to detect anomalies and develop
predictive models for plant growth. The availability of high-quality,
off-the-shelf structure-from-motion (SfM) and photogrammetry packages has
enabled a vibrant community of roboticists to apply computer vision for
non-destructive plant monitoring. While existing approaches tend to focus on
either high-throughput (e.g. satellite, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV),
vehicle-mounted, conveyor-belt imagery) or high-accuracy/robustness to
occlusions (e.g. turn-table scanner or robot arm), we propose a middle-ground
that achieves high accuracy with a medium-throughput, highly automated robot.
Our design pairs the workspace scalability of a cable-driven parallel robot
(CDPR) with the dexterity of a 4 degree-of-freedom (DoF) robot arm to
autonomously image many plants from a variety of viewpoints. We describe our
robot design and demonstrate it experimentally by collecting daily photographs
of 54 plants from 64 viewpoints each. We show that our approach can produce
scientifically useful measurements, operate fully autonomously after initial
calibration, and produce better reconstructions and plant property estimates
than those of over-canopy methods (e.g. UAV). As example applications, we show
that our system can successfully estimate plant mass with a Mean Absolute Error
(MAE) of 0.586g and, when used to perform hypothesis testing on the
relationship between mass and age, produces p-values comparable to ground-truth
data (p=0.0020 and p=0.0016, respectively).Comment: 8 pages (6-content, 2-citations), 10 figures, 4 tables, submitted to
ICRA 202
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