Laser scanning based growth analysis of plants as a new challenge for deformation monitoring

Nowadays, the areal deformation analysis has become an important task in engineering geodesy. Thereby, not only manmade objects are of high interest, also natural objects, like plant organs, are focused more frequently. Thus, the analysis of leaf growth, i.e. the spatial development of the leaf surface, can be seen as a problem of deformation monitoring. In contrast to classical geodetic tasks, the absolute size of the deformation of the leaf surface is small, but usually great compared to the object size. Due to the optical characteristics of leaf surfaces, the point clouds, commonly acquired with high precision close-up laser scanners, provide a point-to-point distance that is small or equal compared to the measurement accuracy. Thus, the point clouds are usually processed and the leaf area is derived from a triangulation-based surface representation (mesh), resulting in a significant uncertainty of area calculation. In this paper, we illustrate the lacks of the mesh-based leaf area calculation. Using high precision gauge blocks as well as a number of tomato leaves, uncertainties of the area derivation are revealed and evaluated. The application of a B-spline approximation illustrates the advantages of an approximation-based approach and introduces the prospect for further research.