Crop morphology is a key consideration in crop breeding. Morphology is often highly associated with yield and has huge implications in consumer desirability, packaging and logistics. Currently morphology is selected by breeders in pre-breeding material by eye. This selected characteristic is extremely hard to qualify (fully describe) and quantify. We plan to develop a low cost, multi-purpose 3D digital photography phenotyping station, allowing users to build an incredibly high-resolution final 3D model of large biological structures which we will leverage for phenotyping crop and non-crop plant species. The Pheno3D platform will be designed to capture a high level of surface structure detail from which a high-resolution point cloud will be constructed using structure-from-motion technology. This point cloud will then be used to quantify volume, extract surface measurements and will be ultimately used as the frame upon which the images can be rendered to give a full digital likeness. We believe the Pheno3D platform could be rapidly adopted as a standard research tool for integration into experimental pipelines that investigate the genetics that underpin plant morphology.
Published March 9, 2021
Comments