Voxel Carving Based 3D Reconstruction of Sorghum Identifies Genetic Determinants of Radiation Interception Efficiency

Changes in canopy architecture traits have been shown to contribute to yield increases. Optimizing both light interception and radiation use efficiency of agricultural crop canopies will be essential to meeting growing needs for food. Canopy architecture is inherently 3D, but many approaches to measuring canopy architecture component traits treat the canopy as a two dimensional structure in order to make large scale measurement, selective breeding, and gene identification logistically feasible. We develop a high throughput voxel carving strategy to reconstruct three dimensional representations of maize and sorghum from a small number of RGB photos. This approach was employed to generate three dimensional reconstructions of a sorghum association population at the late vegetative stage of development. Light interception parameters estimated from these reconstructions enabled the identification of both known and previously unreported loci controlling light interception efficiency in sorghum. The approach described here is generalizable and scalable and it enables 3D reconstructions from existing plant high throughput phenotyping datasets. For future datasets we propose a set of best practices to increase the accuracy of three dimensional reconstructions.