EasyDCP: An affordable, high‐throughput tool to measure plant phenotypic traits in 3D

Abstract

Abstract High‐throughput 3D phenotyping is a rapidly emerging field that has widespread application for measurement of individual plants. Despite this, high‐throughput plant phenotyping is rarely used in ecological studies due to financial and logistical limitations. We introduce EasyDCP, a Python package for 3D phenotyping, which uses photogrammetry to automatically reconstruct 3D point clouds of individuals within populations of container plants and output phenotypic trait data. Here we give instructions for the imaging setup and the required hardware, which is minimal and do‐it‐yourself, and introduce the functionality and workflow of EasyDCP. We compared the performance of EasyDCP against a high‐end commercial laser scanner for the acquisition of plant height and projected leaf area. Both tools had strong correlations with ground truth measurement, and plant height measurements were more accurate using EasyDCP (plant height: EasyDCP r 2 = 0.96, Laser r 2 = 0.86; projected leaf area: EasyDCP r 2 = 0.96, Laser r 2 = 0.96). EasyDCP is an open‐source software tool to measure phenotypic traits of container plants with high‐throughput and low labour and financial costs.

Plant phenotyping relevance

EasyDCPは、フォトグラメトリによる3D植物表現型取得と自動形質抽出のためのソフトウェア・撮像ワークフローを開発し、レーザースキャナおよび実測値と比較検証しており、方法が研究の中心です。

Code and data availability

The paper's EasyDCP source code is publicly available on GitHub, and the performance-test data (source images, point clouds, trait data, R files) plus code and documentation are archived on Zenodo.