Measurement of Overlapping Leaf Area of Ice Plants Using Digital Image Processing Technique

Abstract

Non-destructive and destructive leaf area estimation are critical in plant physiological and ecological experiments. In modern agriculture, ubiquitous digital cameras and scanners are primarily replacing traditional leaf area measurements. Thus, measuring the leaflet’s dimension is integral in analysing plant photosynthesis and growth. Leaf dimension assessment with image processing is widely used nowadays. In this investigation employed an image segmentation algorithm to classify the ice plant (Mesembryanthemum crystallinum L.) canopy image with a threshold segmentation technique by grey colour model and calculating the degree of green colour in the HSV (hue, saturation, value) model. Notably, the segmentation technique is used to separate suitable surfaces from a defective noisy background. In this work, the canopy area was measured by pixel number statistics relevant to the known reference area. Furthermore, this paper proposed total leaf area estimation in a destructive method by a computer coordinating area curvimeter and lastly evaluated the overlapping percentage using the total leaf area and canopy area measurements. To assess the overlapping percentage using the proposed algorithm, the curvimeter method experiment was performed on 24 images of ice plants. The obtained results reveal that the overlapping percentage is less than 10%, as evidenced by a difference in the curvimeter and the proposed algorithm’s results with the canopy leaf area approach. Furthermore, the results show a strong correlation between the canopy and total leaf area (R2: 0.99) calculated by our proposed method. This overlapping leaf area finding offers a significant contribution to crop evolution by using computational techniques to make monitoring easier.