Phenotypic Parameters Estimation of Plants using Deep Learning based 3D Reconstruction from Single RGB Image

Monitoring crop growth is of great significance to obtain crop growth status information for development of smart agriculture. The traditional way to measure the phenotypic parameters of crops is labor-intensive and encounters inconvenient operations. In this study, we propose to obtain the phenotypic parameters of crops from 3-D reconstruction of plants from single RGB images using a data-driven plant phenotypic parameters estimation network (P3ES-Net) deep neural network, which enables to estimate the depth shift and camera focal length used for depth estimation and reconstruction of the 3-D model of plants. Based on the principles of the monocular ranging and pinhole imaging model, crop phenotypic parameters such as height, canopy size, and trunk diameter can then be calculated from the 3-D model. Experiments with four practical plants present that our method is able to achieve acceptable evaluation of the growth status of plants. Of more significance, it achieves particular superior depth estimation performance over a commercial depth camera, which is a very new on-sale depth camera using stereo vision and deep learning network. This potential performance throws light on the low-cost measurement of crop phenotypic parameters using RGB camera in monitoring crop growth.