Root crown phenotyping measures the top portion of crop root systems and can be used for marker-assisted breeding, genetic mapping, and understanding how roots influence soil resource acquisition. Several imaging protocols and image analysis programs exist, but they are not optimized for high-throughput, repeatable, and robust root crown phenotyping. The RhizoVision Crown platform integrates an imaging unit, image capture software, and image analysis software that are optimized for reliable

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... action of measurements from large numbers of root crowns. The hardware platform utilizes a back light and a monochrome machine vision camera to capture root crown silhouettes. RhizoVision Imager and RhizoVision Analyzer are free, open-source software that streamline image acquisition and image analysis with intuitive graphical user interfaces. RhizoVision Analyzer was physically calibrated using copper wire and extensively validated with 10,464 ground-truth simulated images of dicot and monocot root systems. The entire platform was further validated by phenotyping 6,256 root crowns from field-grown wheat and soybean populations, and linear discriminant analysis accurately classified the root crowns using the multivariate measurements. Overall, the integrated RhizoVision Crown platform facilitates state-of-the-art phenotyping of crop root crowns, and sets a standard for which open plant phenotyping platforms broadly can be benchmarked.