Visual Functional-Structural Plant Modeling Innovatively as a Compound Eye: Opening a New Way for Advancing the Scientific Cognition of Plant Vision.

Plant vision is an interesting interdisciplinary branch of botany and vision science, and its emerging studies have composed an epic journey of discovery. However, there are few endeavors on modeling how a plant as an integrity sees. Inspired by the similarity between those discovered laws of plant vision and the visual performance of some insect species with compound eyes, the visual functional-structural plant modeling as a compound eye is innovatively proposed. Using this adapted basic-pattern-oriented modeling, we tried to validate its feasibility in terms of the structural support, visual pathway, and functional performance. First, for a diversity of woody plants, their crowns proved to show self-similar profiles, which render the omnidirectional surfaces for structurally supporting the proposed model. Second, for many plant species, their branching proved to abide by the Pareto front, which ensures the optimality of assuming the visual pathway along the branching network. Third, in canopies the varying, but existing horizontal and vertical modes of crown shyness are detected, which in functional performance accords with the panoramic visibility of the proposed model. Overall, the feasibility of compound eye modeling is validated preliminarily, with the implication of opening a way for advancing the scientific cognition of plant vision.