View Project

The prime aim of this project is to develop a microwave imaging system over the UWB regime that is capable of root phenotyping for habitat restoration.

As one of the plant’s three major organs, the root system provides functions that are central to plant fitness, such as nutrient absorption, fixation, water transmission, synthesis and storage. The spatial distribution of roots in the soil directly affects the growth and health of plants. In addition, root systems transfer carbon, which is captured from the atmospheric CO2 by plants, to soil and aid long-term soil carbon storage. A better understanding of root phenotype in situ and non destructively is important for the research of soil and plant science, earth system science and others. Many state-of-the-art research works have been conducted for structural health monitoring and fault diagnosis in the field of non-destructive evaluation (NDE) and have made remarkable progress in the Habitat Restoration. Few names are; X-ray computed tomography, Computed tomography (CT) and position emission tomography (PET), Confocal laser scanning microscopy, Fluorescence techniques, Hyperspectral imaging method, THz imaging method, and ultra-wideband microwave imaging (UBMI) system. In this project, an UBMI system will be developed which is capable of creating a dielectric map of the scanning area by extracting the changes in both magnitude and phase in the transmitted and reflected signal. The time-reversal method will be used to create a 2D reconstruction image of the root, which can provide the size and position information of the root for habitat restoration. To verify the method’s feasibility, an electromagnetic numerical model will be studied that simulates the transmission signal of two ultra-wideband microwave antennas. The simulated signal of roots with different shapes will show the proposed system’s capability to measure the root size in the soil. Experimental validations will be conducted considering three sets of measurements with different sizes, numbers and locations, and the experimental result will indicate that the developed imaging system is able to differentiate root sizes and numbers with high contrast. The reconstruction from both simulations and experimental measurements will be provided with accurate size estimation of the plats in the soil, which indicates the system’s potential for root imaging. In a nutshell, in this proposal, an UBMI system will be proposed and developed to offer low cost, high-contrast and fast NDE for plant root imaging and that to be useful for habitat restoration.

Expected outputs of the project is to develop a portable, automatic, low cost and lower ionizing imaging tool for real-time monitoring of a root system in a real soil environment for habitat restoration.

The proposed Ultra-Wideband Microwave Imaging (UBMI) system is expected to have a significant impact on:

1. Habitat Restoration: Providing accurate, non-destructive root imaging for improved understanding of root systems, enabling more effective restoration strategies.

2. Agricultural Research: Offering a low-cost, high-contrast, and fast imaging solution for plant root research, enhancing understanding of root phenotypes and soil interactions.

3. Environmental Sustainability: Contributing to soil carbon storage research by enabling non-destructive monitoring of root systems, which play a crucial role in carbon sequestration.

4. Ecosystem Management: Informing ecosystem management decisions by providing valuable insights into root system dynamics, facilitating more effective conservation and restoration efforts.