Quality Analysis of a High-Precision Kinematic Laser Scanning System for the Use of Spatio-Temporal Plant and Organ-Level Phenotyping in the Field
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
18/01/2023
Dear authors,
In the manuscript Quality Analysis of a High-Precision Kinematic Laser Scanning System for the Use of Spatial-Temporal Plant and Organ-Level Phenotyping in the Field you present the usage of a robot, equipped with a high-resolution mobile laser scanning system, as it is usually used to create high-definition 3D maps of urban environments, for plant and organ-level morphological phenotyping in agricultural field conditions.
General comments
The study is interesting and experimental results indicate the possibility of wider application of the proposed method in agriculture. Such manuscripts should be written in the third person. In the text, you wrote 'we' 119 times, which greatly irritates the reader. In this type of manuscript, it is understood that you are the authors of all claims and results that are not referenced. This is also indicated by your names under the title. So, please change this throughout the text.
The abstract is too long and does not agree with the instructions to the authors. Yours has 352 words and the instructions say it should not be more than 200 words. The abstract should contain only the basic facts and main results, all other details should be given in the manuscript. Here you don't state what you did, but what you achieved.
In the Introduction, there is no comparison of similar results with your results, so it is not possible to see what your contribution to science is, except for conducting analysis, which is a professional job.
In the Materials and Methods chapter, references are missing for many claims. This part of the text is confusingly written. Theory and practical work are mixed in such a way that it is not clear (at least to me) how the experiments were carried out. Different terms are also mixed up, such as precision and accuracy.
No Conclusion. Some general statements are made in the Summary and Outlook chapter, but there is no specific Conclusion in terms of novelty in relation to existing methods. Without it, this can be considered professional work.
Based on this type of manuscript, it is unclear what the subject of the manuscript is. Whether it is monitoring and assessment of crops stage (agronomy) or testing the use of a laser scanner for scanning plants. Furthermore, no cost-effective analysis was presented, that is, whether this is even worth doing, given that the spectroscopic component is missing, which is the main indicator of the current state of the plant. I suggest better structuring of the text, and focusing on the essentials.
Specific comments (are in the manuscript)
- Line 1-24 - The abstract is too long and does not agree with the instructions to the authors.
- Line 10 - Such manuscripts should be written in the third person. Change this throughout the text.
- Line 78-81 - Does this mean that no one has ever done this before you, or …? Because just conducting a qualitative analysis is not a scientific contribution.
- Line 93-111 - References are missing for many claims.
- Table 1 (page 7) - The description of the table should be placed above the table.
- Line 224-227 - These claims are a little muddied here. Precision is the ability to repeat the same result, while accuracy is the deviation from the true value. Do you really need high absolute positional accuracy, or is good relative positional accuracy sufficient to determine the plant in the space?
- Line 232-233 - I think the wrong term is used here, or it needs to be further explained. Precision refers to the repetition of an action, and this is not the case here. This is about scanning.
- Line 264 - Not 'can', but 'must' calculate the theoretical GSD value for your shooting needs according to the size of the objects you are shooting.
- Line 625 - Not 'paper', 'analysis'!
Best regards
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 1
Dear reviewer 1,
Based on your comments we modified our manuscript, see attachment. Within the PDF the modified part of the manuscript are highlighted in yellow.
In the following, we add your original comments and colorize the individual responses in red. If you have any further questions and/or comments related to the revised paper feel free to contact us.
Best regards,
Felix Esser
Original comments & responses:
Dear authors,
In the manuscript Quality Analysis of a High-Precision Kinematic Laser Scanning System for the Use of Spatial-Temporal Plant and Organ-Level Phenotyping in the Field you present the usage of a robot, equipped with a high-resolution mobile laser scanning system, as it is usually used to create high-definition 3D maps of urban environments, for plant and organ-level morphological phenotyping in agricultural field conditions.
General comments
The study is interesting and experimental results indicate the possibility of wider application of the proposed method in agriculture. Such manuscripts should be written in the third person. In the text, you wrote 'we' 119 times, which greatly irritates the reader. In this type of manuscript, it is understood that you are the authors of all claims and results that are not referenced. This is also indicated by your names under the title. So, please change this throughout the text.
We know about the discussion in the writing style in the first and/or third person’s view. There exist many papers written in both styles. We decided to use a mixture of both styles in our paper to address a diversified, fluid reading.
In the revised manuscript we reduced the number of “we” and “our” formulations (119).
The abstract is too long and does not agree with the instructions to the authors. Yours has 352 words and the instructions say it should not be more than 200 words. The abstract should contain only the basic facts and main results, all other details should be given in the manuscript. Here you don't state what you did, but what you achieved.
Based on the author’s instruction of the journal remote sensing (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing/instructions) the abstract should be written as one paragraph (of about 300 words). Since our abstract has a number of 352 words we assume that the length of the abstract does not contradict the journal’s instructions.
Based on the instruction (see link above) the content of the abstract should contain the following key information:
- Overarching goal & purpose/rationale of the study
- Data used, the approach adopted, and methods used
- Key focus of the paper should be highlighted and limitations of the studies
- Societal benefits and/or breakthroughs
For the revision of our manuscript, we modify and precise the abstract to meet the bullet points listed above and take the number of allowed words into account.
In the Introduction, there is no comparison of similar results with your results, so it is not possible to see what your contribution to science is, except for conducting analysis, which is a professional job.
The contribution of our paper focuses on the quality analysis of the 3D crop point clouds created with the kinematic laser scanning system under field conditions for the usage of crop phenotyping on plant and plant organ scales. The novelty of the work is the use of a high-end laser system that is used under field conditions and the quality analysis in order to prove the usage of the system and its generated point clouds for plant and plant organ scale phenotyping in the field.
In the revision of the manuscript, we precise the formulations in the introduction to clarify the contributions of the work.
In the Materials and Methods chapter, references are missing for many claims. This part of the text is confusingly written. Theory and practical work are mixed in such a way that it is not clear (at least to me) how the experiments were carried out. Different terms are also mixed up, such as precision and accuracy.
For the revision of the chapter materials and methods, we add more information about the origin of the sensor’s specifications and delimit the theory and practical work from each other. Furthermore, we clarify why we use the terms precision and accuracy.
No Conclusion. Some general statements are made in the Summary and Outlook chapter, but there is no specific Conclusion in terms of novelty in relation to existing methods. Without it, this can be considered professional work.
In conclusion of our work, we precise the formulations in a way to underline the novelty results in our paper.
Based on this type of manuscript, it is unclear what the subject of the manuscript is. Whether it is monitoring and assessment of crops stage (agronomy) or testing the use of a laser scanner for scanning plants. Furthermore, no cost-effective analysis was presented, that is, whether this is even worth doing, given that the spectroscopic component is missing, which is the main indicator of the current state of the plant. I suggest better structuring of the text, and focusing on the essentials.
The subject of the manuscript is the quality analysis of our kinematic laser scanning and its generated point clouds in the context of 3D structural phenotyping in agricultural fields. In the introduction of the paper, we give examples of several applications of that 3D information like breeding, and plant performance analysis (daily accumulated light, chlorophyll content, …).
We know that hyperspectral image information plays an important role in crop health monitoring and plant state estimation. Nevertheless, the focus of our work is on structural plant data that is given by the high-resolution 3D crop point clouds.
In the revision of the paper, we precise our formulations in a way that the reader better understands the paper’s topic and its contribution to science.
Specific comments (are in the manuscript)
- Line 1-24 - The abstract is too long and does not agree with the instructions to the authors.
Based on the author’s instructions of the journal “remote sensing” the abstract length should be about 300 words.
- Line 10 - Such manuscripts should be written in the third person. Change this throughout the text.
We try to reduce the number of first-person sentences, since 119 occurrences of “we” seems to be too much.
- Line 78-81 - Does this mean that no one has ever done this before you, or …? Because just conducting a qualitative analysis is not a scientific contribution.
The usage of a kinematic laser scanning system on that quality level in the field in order to compute structural crop traits on plant and plant organ levels has never been done in the research community before (based on our knowledge). Moreover, there are no works dealing with the definition and evaluation quality analysis of 3D crop point clouds created with kinematic laser scanning systems.
We clarify these contributions and the novelty in the revised paper.
- Line 93-111 - References are missing for many claims.
In the revision, we add information about the origin of this sensor information.
- Table 1 (page 7) - The description of the table should be placed above the table.
In the writing process, we used the MDPI remote sensing template, which places the caption below the table.
- Line 224-227 - These claims are a little muddied here. Precision is the ability to repeat the same result, while accuracy is the deviation from the true value. Do you really need high absolute positional accuracy, or is good relative positional accuracy sufficient to determine the plant in the space?
Since we have no true or reference values for the target center coordinates, we are just able to compute the precision, which is, as you said, the repeatability of the center coordinates. Nevertheless, in the science community the formulation “georeferencing precision” is not used. For that reason, we decided to use the term “accuracy” instead.
The need for high absolute accuracy depends on the application. If a small plant, for example in the early stages has to be monitored over time, high georeferencing accuracy is required. But if the interest is more on 3D structural information on the plot level (for example 1.5m x 3.0m) a temporal assignment of those plots can be achieved with less than centimeter-level georeferencing accuracy.
In the revision of the paper, we clarify the need for high georeferencing accuracy in the context of plant and plant organ phenotyping.
- Line 232-233 - I think the wrong term is used here, or it needs to be further explained. Precision refers to the repetition of an action, and this is not the case here. This is about scanning.
In the section “point precision” we want to analyze the distribution of the points on the plant surfaces. One measure for that is the computation of a standard deviation of residuals to the local best-fit plane. We use the term “precision” here since we have no reference data to compute the accuracy.
We modify the sentence in a way that the reader is not confused.
- Line 264 - Not 'can', but 'must' calculate the theoretical GSD value for your shooting needs according to the size of the objects you are shooting.
In revision, we change the formulation in that context.
- Line 625 - Not 'paper', 'analysis'!
We changed this formulation in the revision.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The present work tries to improve the techniques of automatic detection of the shape of plants (herbaceous in this case). This aspect is very important especially in some experimental sectors related to agriculture such as breeding.
The work is original in that the authors evaluate and fine-tune tools coming from other fields of application from an "agricultural" point of view.
The work is written in good scientific language and presents an accurate bibliographic analysis. It is easy to read even for the uninitiated. To make it easier to understand the text, there is a list of acronyms used.
The images are of a good standard and are presented very clearly.
The development of the work is complete and consistent with the objectives initially described.
Nobody is perfect I found this typo.
Line 101: there is something wrong in “The angular ressingle-plant.0088 ◦ leads”
Author Response
Dear reviewer 2,
Based on your comments and other reviews we modified our manuscript, see attachment. Within the revised manuscript the modified parts are highlighted in yellow.
In the following, we add your original comments and colorize the individual responses in red. If you have any further questions and/or comments related to the revised paper feel free to contact us.
Best regards,
Felix Esser
Original comments & responses:
The present work tries to improve the techniques of automatic detection of the shape of plants (herbaceous in this case). This aspect is very important especially in some experimental sectors related to agriculture such as breeding.
The work is original in that the authors evaluate and fine-tune tools coming from other fields of application from an "agricultural" point of view.
The work is written in good scientific language and presents an accurate bibliographic analysis. It is easy to read even for the uninitiated. To make it easier to understand the text, there is a list of acronyms used.
The images are of a good standard and are presented very clearly.
The development of the work is complete and consistent with the objectives initially described.
Nobody is perfect I found this typo.
Line 101: there is something wrong in “The angular ressingle-plant.0088 ◦ leads”
We apologize for this mistake and update this sentence in the revised manuscript.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Review comments on remotesensing-2171701
I’d like to compliment the authors' ideas on high-precision kinematic laser scanning system for plant and organ-level morphological phenotyping in agricultural field conditions. This is very well written draft. I recommend to be published as is.
Author Response
Dear reviewer 3,
Thank you for your kind review! Based on other reviewers’ comments we modified our manuscript.
Attached you will find the revised manuscript with modified parts highlighted in yellow.
Since your review was exclusively positive we just want to inform you that there is a revised version of our manuscript available now.
Best regards,
Felix Esser
Your last review:
I’d like to compliment the authors' ideas on high-precision kinematic laser scanning system for plant and organ-level morphological phenotyping in agricultural field conditions. This is very well written draft. I recommend to be published as is.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
This is an amazing and outstanding work. In this work, a high-performance kinematic laser scanning system is presented that can be used to conduct three-dimensional phenotypic research on different field crops. This work's experimental design is adequate, and the methodology is suitable. The study contains a clear organization, comprehensive data, sound analysis, reliable findings, and good writing. I simply have a few minor concerns and suggestions and I'm hoping for a response. After a minor revision, I recommend publishing it in the journal Remote Sensing. -1, L49-50. Please briefly introduce the crops and phenotypes involved in these works using TLS point clouds. -2, L54-55. Please briefly introduce the crops for which these image-based 3D reconstruction works are used. -3, Please briefly introduce the software and hardware information of the point cloud data processing system, so as to provide a reference for scholars in the same field. -4, In order to give readers a clear and intuitive understanding of the structure and content of the entire manuscript, it is suggested that a workflow be added to the method section in light of the field observation, data processing, precision testing, and phenotypic information extraction of various crops that are involved in this paper.Author Response
Dear reviewer 4,
Thanks for your kind review! Based on your and other reviewers’ comments we modified our manuscript. Attached you will find the revised paper with modified parts highlighted in yellow.
In the following, we add your original comments and colorize the individual responses in red. If you have any further questions and/or comments related to the revised paper feel free to contact us.
Best regards,
Felix Esser
Original comments & responses:
This is an amazing and outstanding work. In this work, a high-performance kinematic laser scanning system is presented that can be used to conduct three-dimensional phenotypic research on different field crops. This work's experimental design is adequate, and the methodology is suitable. The study contains a clear organization, comprehensive data, sound analysis, reliable findings, and good writing.
I simply have a few minor concerns and suggestions and I'm hoping for a response. After a minor revision, I recommend publishing it in the journal Remote Sensing.
-1, L49-50. Please briefly introduce the crops and phenotypes involved in these works using TLS point clouds.
We added this information to the revised paper.
-2, L54-55. Please briefly introduce the crops for which these image-based 3D reconstruction works are used.
We added this information to the revised paper.
-3, Please briefly introduce the software and hardware information of the point cloud data processing system, so as to provide a reference for scholars in the same field.
The georeferencing pipeline (eq. 1.) is self-implemented within a Matlab script. For point cloud visualization, outlier filtering, and cutting we use the open-source software cloud compare. The phenotypic traits extraction is implemented in a python script. All scripts and software run on a standard office computer.
In the revised paper we added this information to the relevant parts of the manuscript.
-4, In order to give readers a clear and intuitive understanding of the structure and content of the entire manuscript, it is suggested that a workflow be added to the method section in light of the field observation, data processing, precision testing, and phenotypic information extraction of various crops that are involved in this paper.
In the revision, we precise and extend our formulations in chapter 2 (materials and methods) to address your bullet points mentioned above.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
14/02/2023
Dear authors,
In the manuscript Quality Analysis of a High-Precision Kinematic Laser Scanning System for the Use of Spatial-Temporal Plant and Organ-Level Phenotyping in the Field you present the usage of a robot, equipped with a high-resolution mobile laser scanning system, as it is usually used to create high-definition 3D maps of urban environments, for plant and organ-level morphological phenotyping in agricultural field conditions.
General comments
The authors responded to all my comments and corrected parts of the manuscript. After that, I have no further comments on this version of the manuscript.
I hope that the authors are also more satisfied with this version of the manuscript, because that was the purpose of my comments.
Best regards
