3D point clouds for grain breeding

Grain Breeding:

Grain is a staple food worldwide. In the context of land use, climate change and a growing world population, the breeding of efficient, robust and high-performance grain varieties is more important than ever.

The recording of quality parameters for the evaluation of new varieties is mainly carried out manually and requires a lot of time and personnel. An automated recording of the most important parameters such as crop density (number of ears per square meter), but also the development of new methods that record parameters that were previously not recordable, is therefore of considerable interest to breeding companies and research.

The "Point Clouds in Breeding" Project: 

This is what the "Point clouds in breeding" project is about, which deals with the efficient collection and evaluation of 2D image data and 3D information on grain in field trials. Part of the project is to develop an AI pipeline that can handle point cloud data and derive known breeding parameters such as crop density and new breeding parameters such as ear volume from this data by detecting the ears.