Measuring plant geometry in the field

Measuring morphological parameters of crops in their natural environment is important in many fields of agronomy. Breeders usually resort to experienced personnel to rate cultivars at different growing stages. Unfortunately the variations achieved by breeding are often smaller than the statistic distribution of the assessments of individual raters. I the following a system for automatic measurement of geometric plant features like number of leaves and leaf-area-index is presented to offer objective evaluations about the plant's growth. There exist different approaches for measuring crops (for an overview see for example [1]), but most of them are very time-consuming like contact measurements or hardly practical outdoors. Thus in practice morphological parameters are usually extracted only for small samples under laboratory conditions. We present stable a stable method based on contactless measuring and model-driven evaluation that can be applied in the field, which allows the observation of a large number of plants in their natural environment.