Korean Journal of Agricultural Science ISSN:2466-2402(Print) 2466-2410(Online) 농업과학연구

It is important to improve the efficiency of plant breeding and crop yield to fulfill increasing food demands. In plant phenotyping studies, the capability to correlate morphological traits such as plant height, stem diameter, leaf length, leaf width, leaf angle and size of panicle of the plants has an important role. However, manual phenotyping of plants is prone to human errors and is labor intensive and time-consuming. Hence, it is important to develop techniques that measure plant phenotypic traits accurately and rapidly. The aim of this study was to determine the feasibility of point cloud data based on a 3D light detection and ranging (LiDAR) system for plant phenotyping. The obtained results were then verified through manually acquired data from the sorghum samples. This study measured the plant height, plant crown diameter and the panicle height and diameter. The R2 of each trait was 0.83, 0.94, 0.90, and 0.90, and the root mean square error (RMSE) was 6.8 cm, 1.82 cm, 5.7 mm, and 7.8 mm, respectively. The results showed good correlation between the point cloud data and manually acquired data for plant phenotyping. The results indicate that the 3D LiDAR system has potential to measure the phenotypes of sorghum in a rapid and accurate way.