Extraction of 3D distribution of potato plant CWSI based on thermal infrared image and binocular stereovision system.

As the largest component of crops, water has an important impact on the growth and development of crops. Timely, rapid, continuous, and non-destructive detection of crop water stress status is crucial for crop water-saving irrigation, production, and breeding. Indices based on leaf or canopy temperature acquired by thermal imaging are widely used for crop water stress diagnosis. However, most studies fail to achieve high-throughput, continuous water stress detection and mostly focus on two-dimension measurements. This study developed a low-cost three-dimension (3D) motion robotic system, which is equipped with a designed 3D imaging system to automatically collect potato plant data, including thermal and binocular RGB data. A method is developed to obtain 3D plant fusion point cloud with depth, temperature, and RGB color information using the acquired thermal and binocular RGB data. Firstly, the developed system is used to automatically collect the data of the potato plants in the scene. Secondly, the collected data was processed, and the green canopy was extracted from the color image, which is convenient for the speeded-up robust features algorithm to detect more effective matching features. Photogrammetry combined with structural similarity index was applied to calculate the optimal homography transform matrix between thermal and color images and used for image registration. Thirdly, based on the registration of the two images, 3D reconstruction was carried out using binocular stereo vision technology to generate the original 3D point cloud with temperature information. The original 3D point cloud data were further processed through canopy extraction, denoising, and k-means based temperature clustering steps to optimize the data. Finally, the crop water stress index (CWSI) of each point and average CWSI in the canopy were calculated, and its daily variation and influencing factors were analyzed in combination with environmental parameters. The developed system and the proposed method can effectively detect the water stress status of potato plants in 3D, which can provide support for analyzing the differences in the three-dimensional distribution and spatial and temporal variation patterns of CWSI in potato.