Imaging technologies for plant high-throughput phenotyping: a review

Abstract

Phenomics studies a variety of phenotypic plant traits and is the key to understanding genetic functions and environmental effects on plants. With the rapid development of genomics, many plant phenotyping platforms have been developed to study complex traits related to the growth, yield, and adaptation to biotic or abiotic stress, but the ability to acquire high-throughput phenotypic data has become the bottleneck in the study of plant genomics. In recent years, researchers around the world have conducted extensive experiments and research on high-throughput, image-based phenotyping techniques, including visible light imaging, fluorescence imaging, thermal imaging, spectral imaging, stereo imaging, and tomographic imaging. This paper considers imaging technologies developed in recent years for high-throughput phenotyping, reviews applications of these technologies in detecting and measuring plant morphological, physiological, and pathological traits, and compares their advantages and limitations.