WATCHING GRASS GROW- A PILOT STUDY ON THE SUITABILITY OF PHOTOGRAMMETRIC TECHNIQUES FOR QUANTIFYING CHANGE IN ABOVEGROUND BIOMASS IN GRASSLAND EXPERIMENTS

Abstract

Abstract. Grassland ecology experiments in remote locations requiring quantitative analysis of the biomass in defined plots are becoming increasingly widespread, but are still limited by manual sampling methodologies. To provide a cost-effective automated solution for biomass determination, several photogrammetric techniques are examined to generate 3D point cloud representations of plots as a basis, to estimate aboveground biomass on grassland plots, which is a key ecosystem variable used in many experiments. Methods investigated include Structure from Motion (SfM) techniques for camera pose estimation with posterior dense matching as well as the usage of a Time of Flight (TOF) 3D camera, a laser light sheet triangulation system and a coded light projection system. In this context, plants of small scales (herbage) and medium scales are observed. In the first pilot study presented here, the best results are obtained by applying dense matching after SfM, ideal for integration into distributed experiment networks.

Plant phenotyping relevance

草地プロットの地上部バイオマスを定量するため、複数の3D・フォトグラメトリ手法を比較検討しており、植物形質取得法が研究の中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper describes a pilot photogrammetric study (SfM, TOF, laser light sheet, coded light) on grassland plots, but contains no data availability statement, no public dataset or image deposit, and no author code or model release. Only figures of 3D point clouds are shown within the article itself, which does not count

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