Extracting corn geometric structural parameters using Kinect

In remote sensing and agriculture, corn is a common crop which is often studied. In both cases, it is important to measure the geometric structural parameters such as Leaf Area Index (LAI) and Leaf Angle Distribution (LAD). They are useful indicators that affect corn growth. Kinect is a sensor that can be used to get the distance between the object and Kinect itself. It costs little but offers high accuracy. We use Kinect to obtain point clouds of the corn and build a 3D model of the leaves in order to measure structural parameters. The current results show the proposed method is feasible. But more efforts should be made to improve the automation and practically of this method.