Automatic image analysis of plant root structures

The minirhizotron technique has provided agricultural scientists the opportunity of observing rhizosphere activities without destroying root structures. Nonetheless, the laborious analysis of the data still prohibits its wide applications. Advanced image understanding techniques are needed to derive satisfactory descriptions of plant root networks in an efficient and robust way. The paper presents a plant root image analysis system designed as a blackboard architecture with a hierarchy of data abstractions. Important properties of plant roots are used throughout the processing and multiple sources of information are combined to resolve uncertainties in image interpretation. Experimental results from some stages of the research are given which support the overall processing scheme