Multi-scale Space-time Registration of Growing Plants

In this paper, we introduce a new method for the space-time registration of a growing plant that is based on matching the plant at different geometric scales. The proposed method starts with the creation of a topological skeleton of the plant at each time step. This skeleton is then used to segment the plant into parts that we call branches. Then these branches are further divided into smaller segments that possess a simple geometric structure. These segments are matched between two time steps using a random forest classifier based on their topological and geometric features. Then, for each pair of segments matched, a point-wise registration is devised using a non-rigid registration method based on a local ICP. We applied our method to various types of plants, including arabidopsis, tomato plant and maize. We established three different metrics for 3D point-wise shape correspondence to test the accuracy, continuity, and cycle consistency of the mapping. We then compared our method with the state-of-the-art. Our results show that our approach achieves better or similar results with a shorter running time.