Open AccessMeasuring canopy height in soybean and wheat using a low‐cost depth camera
Author(s) -
Morrison Malcolm J.,
Gahagan Alison Claire,
Lefebvre Marc Bruno
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
the plant phenome journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2578-2703
DOI - 10.1002/ppj2.20019
Subject(s) - canopy , phenomics , growing season , point cloud , remote sensing , environmental science , throughput , agronomy , mathematics , geography , computer science , biology , artificial intelligence , botany , telecommunications , biochemistry , genomics , genome , wireless , gene
Canopy height is an essential trait in high throughput phenotyping that is often only captured as a single point, which is not always representative of canopy height. New 3D depth cameras such as the RealSense D415 (Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA) may provide a fast and affordable solution for measuring height from portable, ground‐based phenomics systems. Our goal was to determine if the D415 was effective at measuring crop heights under field conditions in wheat ( Triticum aestivum ) and soybean ( Glycine max ) plots. The D415 camera was integrated into our PlotCam platform using the open software development kit from Intel. Distance arrays were captured for each plot at weekly intervals over the growing season. These were compared to canopy heights measured using a single point LiDAR (SPL) system operated by hand. Over the growing season the D415 heights were significantly correlated with the SPL heights in both wheat and soybean with coefficients of 0.77 and 0.95 and NRMSE 0.23 and 0.17 m, respectively. Early season D415 height measurements were not as similar to the SPL as the mid‐and late‐season measurements in wheat and soybean. The relatively low cost and open software development kit of the D415 makes it a promising tool for high throughput phenotyping applications.