Optical Imaging Resources for Crop Phenotyping and Stress Detection

With a rapidly increasing population, diminishing resource availability, and variation in environment, there is a need to change agricultural production to deliver long-term food security. To deliver such change, we need crops that are productive and tolerant to different stress factors. The traditional methods of obtaining data for phenotyping under field conditions, e.g., for morphological traits such as canopy structure or physiological traits such as plant stress-related traits, are laborious and time-consuming. A variety of imaging tools in the visible, spectral, and thermal infrared ranges allow data collection for quantitative studies of complex traits and crop monitoring. These tools can be used on crop phenotyping and monitoring platforms for high-throughput assessment of traits in order to better understand plant stress responses and the physiological pathways underlying yield. The applications and brief review of these imaging techniques are described and discussed in this chapter.