Robust Surface Reconstruction of Plant Leaves from 3D Point Clouds

The automation of plant phenotyping using 3D imaging techniques is indispensable. However, conventional methods for reconstructing the leaf surface from 3D point clouds have a trade-off between the accuracy of leaf surface reconstruction and the method’s robustness against noise and missing points. To mitigate this trade-off, we developed a leaf surface reconstruction method that reduces the effects of noise and missing points while maintaining surface reconstruction accuracy by capturing two components of the leaf (the shape and distortion of that shape) separately using leaf-specific properties. This separation simplifies leaf surface reconstruction compared with conventional methods while increasing the robustness against noise and missing points. To evaluate the proposed method, we reconstructed the leaf surfaces from 3D point clouds of leaves acquired from two crop species (soybean and sugar beet) and compared the results with those of conventional methods. The result showed that the proposed method robustly reconstructed the leaf surfaces, despite the noise and missing points for two different leaf shapes. To evaluate the stability of the leaf surface reconstructions, we also calculated the leaf surface areas for 14 consecutive days of the target leaves. The result derived from the proposed method showed less variation of values and fewer outliers compared with the conventional methods.