Maize Phenotyping

What is a phenotype?

Phenotypes are the physical identity of a plant that includes traits such as color, growth, number of leaves, biomass, yield, etc. Genetics research seeks to decode a plant's 'genotype' or the genetic identity of the plant to predict how a plant will grow. But in order to do this, the phenotype must be carefully examined to see what genotypes give rise to plants with certain characteristics.

How were phenotypes obtained?

Currently phenotype information is obtained by making ground-truth measurements by hand. This is a time consuming process that can result in human error and missed measurements.

The research:

New innovative greenhouses have been created to obtain images with a variety of different techniques that can be stored and analyzed later. There are many images and few methods available to analyze them. Our research is focused on the development of computer vision based phenotyping methods that can be used to analyze images at high-throughput.