By:
On:
In: plants, research
With: 0 Comments

On Wednesday I hosted my first ever British Machine Vision Association (BMVA) one-day workshop. The BMVA are the organisation which drives forwards computer vision in the UK, and they run a series of one-day technical meetings, usually in London, which are often very informative. In order to run one, you have to first propose it, and then the organisation work with you to pull together dates, program, bookings and so on. If you work in computer vision and haven’t been to one yet, you’re missing out. I won’t write an overview of the whole day – that’s already been done very well by Geraint fromRead More →

By:
On:
In: plants, research, vision
With: 0 Comments

We’ve had our first journal paper published from my EPSRC first grant. It gives a comprehensive review of work into the automated image analysis of plants – well, one particular type of plant, Arabidopsis Thaliana. It’s by Jonathan Bell and myself, and it represents a lot of reading, talking and thinking about computer vision and plants. We also make some suggestions which we hope can help inform future work in this area. You can read the full paper here, if you’re interested in computer vision and plant science. The first grant as a whole is looking at time-lapse photography of plants and aims to buildRead More →

By:
On:
In: plants, research, shadows
With: 0 Comments

A Lightstage is a system which lets you completely control illumination in a particular space, and capture images from multiple views. They’re used for high resolution graphics capture and computer vision, and they’re fairly rare. I don’t think there are many non-commercial ones in the UK, and they’re research kit (which means you can’t really just go out and buy one, you’ve got to actually build it). Usually, Lightstages are used for facial feature capture, but I’m kinda interested to use them with plants. With the support of the National Plant Phenomics Centre, here in Aberystwyth, and and Aberystwyth University Research Fund grant (URF) I’veRead More →

By:
On:
In: Geekiness, plants
With: 0 Comments

Right: input plants, left: colour based plant segmentation using Gaussian Mixture Models I’ve won a grant to investigate the dynamic modelling of plant growth using computer vision. The plan is that we’re going to grow a load of Arabidopsis (that’s the plant in the picture above), under time-lapse cameras, and work out where the leaves are, and which leaves cover up which other leaves. Essentially, we’ll use the time-series of images as the plant grows to infer the 3D structure of the plant. Cool, eh? If you might be interested in this kind of project, and you can do computing and machine learning, then getRead More →

By:
On:
In: Geekiness, plants
With: 1 Comment

The International Workshop on Image Analysis Methods for the Plant Sciences will be held this year in Aberystwyth. The workshop is aimed at computer vision and image processing people working in the plant sciences, and plant science people doing work with images. I’m the co-chair, along with Marie Neal from the National Plant Phenomics Centre, Andrew French from Nottingham Computer Science and Susie Lydon from Nottingham’s Centre for Plant Integrative Biology. Key facts Abstract submission 1 Aug. Abstracts should be 2 pages max, PDF, submitted via CMT the conference submission site. Registration deadline 1 Sep. You can register online via EventBrite. Conference dates 15-16 Sep.Read More →