Using high-throughput phenotype platform MVS-Pheno to reconstruct the 3D morphological structure of wheat.

It is of great significance to study the plant morphological structure for improving crop yield and achieving efficient use of resources. Three dimensional (3D) information can more accurately describe the morphological and structural characteristics of crop plants. Automatic acquisition of 3D information is one of the key steps in plant morphological structure research. Taking wheat as the research object, we propose a point cloud data-driven 3D reconstruction method that achieves 3D structure reconstruction and plant morphology parameterization at the phytomer scale. Specifically, we use the MVS-Pheno platform to reconstruct the point cloud of wheat plants and segment organs through the deep learning algorithm. On this basis, we automatically reconstructed the 3D structure of leaves and tillers and extracted the morphological parameters of wheat. The results show that the semantic segmentation accuracy of organs is 95.2%, and the instance segmentation accuracy AP50 is 0.665. The R2 values for extracted leaf length, leaf width, leaf attachment height, stem leaf angle, tiller length, and spike length were 0.97, 0.80, 1.00, 0.95, 0.99, and 0.95, respectively. This method can significantly improve the accuracy and efficiency of 3D morphological analysis of wheat plants, providing strong technical support for research in fields such as agricultural production optimization and genetic breeding.

Three-Dimensional Modeling of Maize Canopies Based on Computational Intelligence.

The 3-dimensional (3D) modeling of crop canopies is fundamental for studying functional-structural plant models. Existing studies often fail to capture the structural characteristics of crop canopies, such as organ overlapping and resource competition. To address this issue, we propose a 3D maize modeling method based on computational intelligence. An initial 3D maize canopy is created using the t-distribution method to reflect characteristics of the plant architecture. The subsequent model considers the 3D phytomers of maize as intelligent agents. The aim is to maximize the ratio of sunlit leaf area, and by iteratively modifying the azimuth angle of the 3D phytomers, a 3D maize canopy model that maximizes light resource interception can be constructed. Additionally, the method incorporates a reflective approach to optimize the canopy and utilizes a mesh deformation technique for detecting and responding to leaf collisions within the canopy. Six canopy models of 2 varieties plus 3 planting densities was constructed for validation. The average R2 of the difference in azimuth angle between adjacent leaves is 0.71, with a canopy coverage error range of 7% to 17%. Another 3D maize canopy model constructed using 12 distinct density gradients demonstrates the proportion of leaves perpendicular to the row direction increases along with the density. The proportion of these leaves steadily increased after 9 × 104 plants ha-1. This study presents a 3D modeling method for the maize canopy. It is a beneficial exploration of swarm intelligence on crops and generates a new way for exploring efficient resources utilization of crop canopies.