Smartphone-Based Visual Measurement and Portable Instrumentation for Crop Seed Phenotyping

For crop breeding and variety screening, it is essential to improve the phenotyping throughput for quantitatively evaluating the seed traits. However, existing high-throughput phenotyping facilities for crop seeds generally have some limitations such as high cost, large size and high weight which can not be used in field. This paper describes a smartphone-based, low-cost, portable instrument to achieve the function of high-throughput field phenotyping for crop seeds. The instrument uses a smartphone as the main platform, which offers rich functionality for fast prototyping the crop seeds. First, advanced computing ability and high-resolution camera offers the condition for machine vision, which measures morphological parameters by image processing. Second, Bluetooth module makes communication convenient for device control. Third, user-friendly Human-Machine Interface (HMI) makes it easy for users to find and correct calculation error. The experiment results showed that the measurement accuracy of phenotypic parameters is greater than 95%, and this instrument can be applied in accurate measurement of crop seeds phenotypic parameters. This work demonstrates the potential for using a smartphone to replace industrial camera and computer for low-cost crop seeds phenotyping instrument.