Luntian: An Automated, High-Throughput Phenotyping System for the Greenness and Biomass of C4 Rice

Plant phenotyping is a vital process that helps farmers and researchers assess the growth, health, and development of a plant. In the Philippines, phenotyping is done manually, with each plant specimen measured and assessed individually, but this process is laborious, time-consuming, and prone to human- error. Automated phenotyping systems have attempted to address this problem through the use of cameras and image processing, but these systems are proprietary and designed for other plants. In order to alleviate this problem, the research aims to develop a high throughput rice phenotyping system that automates the identification of plant greenness and plant biomass of C4 Rice. This research group is currently developing a system that provides an efficient way of phenotyping C4 rice by automating the process. The system is being created and tested with consultation and feedback with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). It is based on various image processing techniques, existing tools and screen house setup used by IRRI. The system is now able to output Leaf Color Chart values for greenness and cubic centimeters for biomass approximation. The plant images are captured based on a specified schedule then these will be processed by the system. A web application is used to view the collected phenotypic data, and change system settings. Results show that the biomass generated by the system is moderately correlated (0.674) to the manually computed biomass while the greenness values are still undergoing verification.