Detection of the 3D temperature characteristics of maize under water stress using thermal and RGB-D cameras

Abstract

Global warming and water resource shortage greatly influence the crop growth and negatively affect the crop yield. Breeding water–stress resistant crop varieties is one of the effective ways to handle this problem. The surface temperatures of the crop are essential for assessing their water stress resistance. Thermal imaging has been widely used to acquire the crop surface temperatures. However, most studies focus on 2D measurement. A 3D thermal imaging system is designed, and a method is developed by using the thermal and RGB-D data to acquire 3D thermal information of maize under water stress conditions. First, thermal and RGB-D cameras were used to collect the thermal and color images, and depth data of maize at the jointing stage and the thermal and color images were processed to extract the edge images of maize. Second, the KAZE feature was selected to register the edge images. Testing results showed that the KAZE feature has better performance than the SURF and BRISK features in the thermal and color image registration of maize. On the basis of the thermal and color image registration, the depth data of maize were assigned with temperature values. Third, the depth data of maize were further processed with denoising, maize extraction, amplification, smoothing, and temperature correction steps to improve the data qualities. Finally, the crop water stress index and canopy–air temperature difference values of each point were calculated. The results demonstrated that the system and the proposed method can effectively detect the water stress characteristics of maize in 3D, which can be combined with the morphological traits of leaves to synthetically analyze the water stress resistance of the crop.