A REAL-TIME 3D VISUALIZATION APPROACH FOR THE APPEARANCE OF CROP LEAVES

A real-time 3D modeling and visualization approach for simulating the appearance of crop leaves are presented. The basis of this method is an appearance model in terms of bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDF) and bidirectional transmittance distribution functions (BTDF) whose diffuse and transmittance term are derived using some physiological parameters. Cook - Torrance is employed to compute the glossy reflectance in our model. For simulating the spatial-varying optical properties of leaves, four appearance textures are utilized to control the parameters of appearance model. In order to achieve a WYSIWYG display result, we simplify the light computing by decomposing light environment into a directional light source and some environment light sources. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is capable of generating different appearance of crop leaves by controlling the physiology parameters and achieving a visually satisfactory display result. Our method has a great potential to become an effective visualization tool for agricultural applications.