3D leaf surface modelling
by
Birgit Loch
Centre for Plant Architecture Informatics (CPAI), Department of Mathematics, University of Queensland, Australia
Coauthors: John Belward (CPAI), Jim Hanan (CPAI)

Leaves play a vital role in plant development, serving as major resource collectors.

In this talk, we concentrate on modelling leaf surfaces for use in virtual plants, computer simulations that can serve as a valuable tool for biologists studying real plants. We first describe data acquisition using three different methods, i.e. sonic digitizer, laser scanner and photogrammetry. Then, we suggest interpolation methods for fitting leaf surfaces using piecewise polynomials on triangular grids. We explain how we deal with non-convex domains, adjusting the triangulation accordingly, and then apply an adaptive method that gives some control over the overall error when only a small number of data points is used. Finally, we display the resulting surface using texture mapping.

Date received: December 19, 2001