Modeling and visualization of rice roots based on morphological parameters

Abstract

As an important organ of absorbing water and nutrients for rice, the cognition and expression of the three-dimensional (3D) morphology of roots has become a bottleneck in-depth study of rice roots due to the observing obstacles of soil. To clarify the morphological and distributional characteristics of rice roots, 'root box' experiments are conducted to mensurate three dimensional spatial coordinates and morphological parameters of rice roots at different growth stages. Based on these experiments and the morphological parameters, the initial position of the root node and growth direction of branches are determined, a rice root model is constructed with B-spline curves by analyzing the topological structure of rice roots to quantify the biological characteristics of rice roots and summarize the morphological structure and growth characteristics of rice roots and improve the cubic growth function to describe the growth change in rice roots. Meanwhile, the output accuracy of the model is tested. In addition, dynamic simulation of rice root growth characteristics in 3D space is implemented using Visual C++ and the OpenGL standard graphics library. Analysis results indicate that the average simulated fitness of the total root length, surface area and volume is about 94.82%, 93.86%, and 91.96%, respectively. Therefore, the model can express the morphological characteristics and growth rules of rice roots at different growth stages, which enrich the digitization and visualization methods for roots of other crops.