Non-destructive measurement for estimating leaf area of Bellis perennis

Non-destructive measurement of approaches of modeling can be very convenient and useful for plant growth estimation. This study, digital image processing was evaluated as a non-destructive technique to estimate leaf area of Bellis perennis. The plant samples were growing in the greenhouse and the images were taken every day using Kinect camera. The proposed method used combination of L*a*b* color space, Otsu’s thresholding, morphological operations and connected component analysis to estimate leaf area of Bellis perennis. L* channel was used to distinguish the leaves and background. Calibration area uses a pot of known area in each image as a scale to calibrate the leaves area. The results show that the algorithm is able to separate leaf pixels from soil or pot backgrounds, and also allow it to be implemented in greenhouse automatically. This algorithm can be used for other plants in assumption that there is not too much leaf overlapped during measurement.