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 get in touch. The job is 16 months at £32k, which is a bit short (but that’s all I could get with the grant money, unless I wanted to drop the salary). I’m fairly sure I can find someone to spend 16 months in Aberystwyth though – it’s a beautiful small seaside town, and a nice place to live, and the salary is not bad for around here, where things are fairly cheap.