Leveraging time-series point clouds for dynamic crop canopy monitoring: Quantifying phenotypic variability and assessing leaf-level photosynthetic contributions.

Abstract

Time-series point clouds have emerged as an effective approach for precise, continuous crop monitoring and quantitative growth analysis. This study constructed a spatiotime-series point cloud dataset containing four species and eleven plant varieties, exploring crop organ instance segmentation, phenotypic parameter extraction, growth quantification, and canopy photosynthesis assessment. A skeleton-based framework for organ-level instance segmentation and time-series analysis is proposed, demonstrating robust performance across all four crops. To fully utilize the time-series data, a novel time-series leaf matching method was introduced, achieving a matching accuracy, defined as the proportion of correctly matched leaves, of over 0.823 for all species. By integrating the matching results with phenotypic parameter extraction, time-series phenotypic data were generated, and a phenotypic variation rate was defined as a suitable metric for quantifying crop growth. Furthermore, these results were integrated into a canopy photosynthesis model to derive key time-series photosynthetic metrics, including photosynthetic rate, absorbed light quantity, light energy utilization efficiency, and each crop organ's contribution to photosynthesis. These metrics provide insights into the crop's growth patterns and photosynthetic strategy. This study offers refined quantitative analysis of crop morphology and photosynthetic parameters through time-series point cloud segmentation, contributing valuable data for advancing plant biology research and enhancing the understanding of crop growth dynamics.

Plant phenotyping relevance

時系列点群から作物器官をセグメンテーションし、葉追跡、形態形質、成長量、光合成関連指標を抽出する手法が研究の中心であるため。

Code and data availability

The paper's Data availability statement explicitly provides authors' public URLs for a subset of the analysis code (GitHub) and the complete time-series 3D crop point cloud dataset (Baidu pan), both directly supporting this paper's phenotyping measurements and analysis.