Data Capture for Virtual Plants

The Virtual Plant Data Capture software suite (Vp Software) is used to collect information on development and growth of real plants by 3-D digitising or plant mapping at regular intervals. These data are transformed into a standard format for analysis using a separate database or statistics package. Growth rules derived from this information can be expressed as L-system productions which can then be interpreted by Virtual Laboratory software to generate virtual plants.

This prototype data capture software is designed to run on IBM-compatible PCs with a 386 or better processor running MSDOS and consists of the following programs:

Vpcoord accepts 3-D coordinate data from a 3-D digitiser and stores the data, labelled according to type of plant part and topological position, in a text file. The digitiser passes information to vpcoord via a "terminate and stay resident" program that puts the digitised coordinates into the keyboard buffer. The program prompts the user to label the digitised points with codes from a user-defined configuration file appropriate for the growth form of the plants to be digitised.

Vpconv converts the 3-D coordinate data collected using vpcoord into angles, lengths and areas of the plant parts specified in the data labels, controlled by a user-defined configuration file with the same format as that used by vpcoord.

Vpmaps is a program which converts L-system-like plant maps (i.e. records of plant topology) into the same labelled data format as produced by vpconv so that the records can be further processed in exactly the same way.

Vpmapls is a program which converts an L-system-like plant map into L-system productions in a format that can be interpreted by the virtual plant generating program cpfg. This allows 2D and 3D images of plant topology to be generated using the Virtual Laboratory software.

The Vp Software suite of programs is copyright 1996 by the Cooperative Research Centre for Tropical Pest Management, Brisbane, Australia. A self-extracting archive of executable MSDOS software and associated documentation is available for downloading under certain conditions.

Last updated: Jim Hanan, 16 January 1997.