Crop 3D: a platform based on LiDAR for 3D high-throughputcrop phenotyping

With the growth of population and the reduction of arable land, breeding has been considered as an effective way to solve the food crisis. As an important part in breeding, high-throughput phenotyping can accelerate the breeding process effectively. Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is an active remote sensing technology that is capable of acquiring three-dimensional (3D) data accurately, and has a great potential application in crop phenotyping. Given that crop phenotyping based on LiDAR technology is not common in China, we developed a high-throughput crop phenotyping platform, named Crop 3D, which integrated LiDAR, high-resolution camera, thermal camera and hyperspectral imager. Compared with traditional crop phenotyping techniques, Crop 3D can acquire the multi-source phenotypic data in the whole crop growing period and extract plant height, plant width, leaf length, leaf width, leaf area, leaf inclination angle and other parameters for plant biology and genomics analysis. In this paper, we described the designs, functions and testing results of the Crop 3D platform. Then, the potential applications and future development of the platform in phenotyping were briefly discussed. We concluded that platforms integrating LiDAR and traditional remote sensing techniques might be the future trend of crop high-throughput phenotyping.