Patent ID: 8391591

Claim:
A method for measuring the growth of leaf disks, comprising the following steps: a) calibrating a capture system and determining calibrating parameters of the capture system; b) capturing at least one stereo image pair of a leaf disk using the calibrated capture system; c) processing each capture image, comprising; i) segmenting the leaf disks by threshold segmentation, ii) carrying out morphological erosion steps on the segmented images, iii) carrying out an edge cleaning to remove the edge of the storage vessel and detecting the edge of the leaf disk on the morphologically eroded images, (d) determining the projected leaf area A p of the leaf disk from the edge-cleaned images e) carrying out a 3D reconstruction comprising: generating a disparity image D by means of a stereo algorithm from the captured image pairs; calculating a 3D surface model based on the previously determined calibration parameters from the disparity image; f) smoothing the previously obtained surface model; g) determining the 3D area A 3D of the leaf disk from the smoothed surface model; h) repeating the image capture according to step b) at different times; i) generating time series of the determined areas by evaluating the images that; were captured at different times in accordance with steps c-g) j) determining the growth rates of the leaf disk from the time series of the determined areas.