AI-enabled Low-Cost 3D Maize Ear Morphometry Platform at Breeding Scale

2026-08-30

AI Summary

研究开发了一种低成本的3D玉米穗形态测量平台，通过使用消费级DSLR相机和NeRF技术，从20秒视频中重建玉米穗模型，解决了高通量表型分析中的成本和劳动力问题。

Abstract

Maize ear geometry (length, width, curvature, and volume) is closely tied to yield and grain-filling outcomes, but existing high-throughput phenotyping pipelines remain constrained by the cost, labor, and specialized hardware they require. We developed and validated a low-cost pipeline that reconstructs a watertight 3-D mesh of a maize ear from a single 20-second video captured with a consumer-grade DSLR on a motorized turntable under uniform LED illumination. Camera poses from a multi-seed COLMAP procedure initialize a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), and a cylindrical holder of known diameter, visible in every frame, provides automatic metric scaling with downstream geometric quality control. Applied to 300 ears spanning a diverse maize inbred panel, 250 (83.3%) passed automated processing and quality control. Skeleton length agreed with manual caliper measurements across all 250 ears (R^2 = 0.964, RMSE = 4.68 mm), and convex-hull volume agreed with water-displacement volume on a 15-ear subset spanning the full size range (R^2 = 0.982, RMSE = 5.26 mL). Residual length error grew with ear curvature, whereas bounding-box height, which records the same straight-line chord as calipers, showed no such trend; the discrepancy therefore originates in the measurement definition, since calipers record the chord while skeleton length traces the geodesic arc. The capture hardware costs approximately 607 USD, and operator involvement fell from roughly five minutes to one minute per ear, with all downstream processing running unattended. The platform provides a foundation for breeding-scale 3-D ear phenotyping.

Problem

• Maize ear geometry
• high-throughput phenotyping
• cost
• labor
• specialized hardware

Innovation

• low-cost pipeline
• 3D mesh reconstruction
• Neural Radiance Field (NeRF)
• automatic metric scaling