Representing Roots on the Basis of Reeb Graphs in Plant Phenotyping

This paper presents a new representation for root images based on Reeb graphs. The representation proposed captures lengths and distances in root structures as well as locations of branches, numbers of lateral roots and the locations of the root tips. An analysis of root images using Reeb graphs is presented and results are compared to ground truth measurements. This paper shows, that the Reeb graph based approach not only captures the characteristics needed for phenotyping of plants, but it also provides a solution to the problem of overlapping roots in the images. Using a Reeb graph based representation, such overlaps can be directly detected without further analysis, during the computation of the graph.