Statistical shape analysis of tuber roots: a methodological case study on laser scanned sugar beets

The efficient and robust statistical analysis of the shape of plant cultivars is an important investigation issue in fields such as plant breeding or growth monitoring. A quantitative shape analysis based on concepts from continuum mechanics is proposed to compute shape averages and a principal component analysis for a given set of tuber root shapes. The underlying model uses an implicit representation of root shapes, and the derived variational approach was implemented applying a finite element discretization. For the acquisition of the input shapes a terrestrial laser scanner was used. In an exemplary case study the model was applied to the analysis of sugar beets of different cultivars.