TomatoWUR: An annotated dataset of tomato plants to quantitatively evaluate segmentation, skeletonisation, and plant-trait extraction algorithms for 3D plant phenotyping.

Plant phenotyping involves the measurements of plant traits to gain more insight into the interaction between the genotype (G), environment (E) and crop management strategies (M). To improve plant phenotyping, accurate measurements are crucial. Manual measurements are biased, time-intensive, and therefore limited to only a few plants. Especially measurements of 3D phenotypic traits, such as plant architecture, internode length, and leaf area are difficult to extract manually. To enhance the speed and accuracy of phenotyping, there is a need for automatic digital plant phenotyping solutions. The presented dataset contains 3D point clouds of tomato plants, which will enable researchers to develop novel methods to extract 3D phenotypic traits. Converting 3D point clouds to plant traits is also known as 3D plant phenotyping. This process can be subdivided into three steps: point cloud segmentation, skeletonisation to extract plant architecture, and plant-traits extraction. Those three steps need to be analysed properly to indicate bottlenecks and improve 3D phenotyping algorithms. Currently, the development of 3D phenotyping algorithms is inhibited by the availability of comprehensive datasets and algorithms to analyse all steps. To our best knowledge only five annotated datasets exist for testing and validating 3D phenotyping algorithms. However, these datasets mainly focus on the segmentation step. Skeletonisation and manual measured plant traits are frequently not included. To improve 3D plant phenotyping, a novel dataset, TomatoWUR, is presented. This comprehensive dataset consists of 44 point clouds of single tomato plants imaged by fifteen cameras to create a point cloud using the shape-from-silhouette methodology. The dataset includes annotated point clouds, skeletons, and manual reference measurements. In addition, the dataset includes software for comprehensive evaluation and comparison of phenotyping methods, which is expected to benefit the development of 3D phenotyping algorithms. The related software can be found our GIT: https://github.com/WUR-ABE/TomatoWUR.