3DPhenoMVS: A Low-Cost 3D Tomato Phenotyping Pipeline Using 3D Reconstruction Point Cloud Based on Multiview Images

Abstract

Manual phenotyping of tomato plants is time consuming and labor intensive. Due to the lack of low-cost and open-access 3D phenotyping tools, the dynamic 3D growth of tomato plants during all growth stages has not been fully explored. In this study, based on the 3D structural data points generated by employing structures from motion algorithms on multiple-view images, we proposed a 3D phenotyping pipeline, 3DPhenoMVS, to calculate 17 phenotypic traits of tomato plants covering the whole life cycle. Among all the phenotypic traits, six of them were used for accuracy evaluation because the true values can be generated by manual measurements, and the results showed that the R2 values between the phenotypic traits and the manual ones ranged from 0.72 to 0.97. In addition, to investigate the environmental influence on tomato plant growth and yield in the greenhouse, eight tomato plants were chosen and phenotyped during seven growth stages according to different light intensities, temperatures, and humidities. The results showed that stronger light intensity and moderate temperature and humidity contribute to a higher biomass and higher yield. In conclusion, we developed a low-cost and open-access 3D phenotyping pipeline for tomato and other plants, and the generalization test was also complemented on other six species, which demonstrated that the proposed pipeline will benefit plant breeding, cultivation research, and functional genomics in the future.