Representing roots on the basis of reeb graphs in plant phenotyping

This paper presents a new representation for root imagesbased on Reeb graphs. The representation proposed captures lengths anddistances in root structures as well as locations of branches, numbers oflateral roots and the locations of the root tips. An analysis of root imagesusing Reeb graphs is presented and results are compared to ground truthmeasurements. This paper shows, that the Reeb graph based approachnot only captures the characteristics needed for phenotyping of plants,but it also provides a solution to the problem of overlapping roots inthe images. Using a Reeb graph based representation, such overlaps canbe directly detected without further analysis, during the computation ofthe graph.