RhizoVision Imager: Software to control machine vision cameras for plant phenotyping

RhizoVision Imager was originally developed for the RhizoVision Crown phenotyping platform. The hardware platform suspends root crowns in front of a backlight with a monochrome camera facing the light in order to capture the root crown silhouette as a greyscale image. While designed for a root phenotyping platform, Imager is well-positioned for general plant phenotyping needs. Imager requires use of Basler machine vision cameras using USB 3.0 connections. Imager depends on the installation of the free Basler Pylon runtime v5.0.12 provided in the redist folder contained within the downloaded ZIP. Once the Pylon runtime is installed, simply download the ZIP file, extract the Imager folder to your local drive, and run the executable. Imager is designed for Windows 10 systems with a 64-bit processor.

RhizoVision Imager connects to all Basler USB 3.0 cameras connected to the system and allows adjustment of gain, exposure time, and gamma. These camera settings may be saved as a profile for later reuse. Imager gives a live view of the selected camera. File names may be entered for single shots, or a barcode scanner may be used to scan a barcode, which will then trigger image acquisition and store the file name as the encoded barcode information.

A screenshot is available in the Files section.

RhizoVision Imager is open-source and released under the Noble GPL license published by Noble Research Institute. The source code is available on GitHub.

Update: We have seen some issues with Imager running on computers with recent updates to Windows 10. We believe the current version v1.1.0 solves the issue. If you experience difficulties, please e-mail yorklm at ornl.gov . Also, note we have updated instructions to install the redistributable Pylon runtime directly from the 'redist' folder included in the ZIP download to ensure compatibility.