Image Processing Based Non-Destructive Method for Measuring Growth of Constructed Wetland Plants

This paper developed a non-destructive method for measuring growth of constructed wetland plants, and it can be outlined as follow: doing image acquisitions of constructed wetland plants regularly with the help of digital camera; introducing image files to a computer through the developed interface, displaying them on the screen. Under Visual C++ compiling integrated environment, users can use the developed "constructed wetland plant image and growth information extraction software" to acquire plant contours (realized by image edge recognition) and plant sizes (characterized by top projected leaf area). The biomass and manually-measured individual plant heights in the experimental wetlands had good correlations, which indicate that the developed non-destructive method based on computer image processing can provide reliable of plant growing.