Fast Construction of Plant Architectural Models Based on Substructure Decomposition

Plant structure, representing the physical link among different organs,includes many similar substructures. In this paper, a new method ispresented to construct plant architectural models of most plant species.The plant structure is decomposed into a stem, a set of lateralsubstructures and a terminal substructure, which is called substructuredecomposition; then based on substructure decomposition, the plantstructures are expressed in an iterative way; and further the derivativeformula is employed to compute the number of organs in plant structuresto get the geometrical sizes of 3D plant organs by borrowing HydraulicModel. Using 3D organs, a substructure library is built. Based on thesubstructures stored in substructure library, one can construct 3D plantstructure according to certain topological and geometrical rules. Theexperiments with different plant species are included in this paper todemonstrate the validity of the new method for constructing plantstructures.The experimental results show that the approach followsbotanical knowledge with high efficiency in constructing plantstructures of most plant species. In addition, this method enables usersto check the detail information of plant structure.