Away Team Tech: 3D flora and fauna within reach – Astrobiology

A Kyushu University researcher reporting in Research Ideas and Outcomes has developed a new technique to scan various plants and animals and reconstruct them into highly detailed 3D models. To date, over 1,400 models have been made available online for public use.

Open any textbook or nature journal and you’ll find stunning, high-resolution images of the diverse flora and fauna that comprise our world. From the botanical illustrations in Dioscorides’ De materia medica (AD 50-70) to Robert Hooke’s sketches of the microscopic world in Micrographia (1665), scientists and artists alike have worked meticulously to depict the true majesty of nature.

The advent of photography has given us even more detailed images of animals and plants, large and small, and in some cases provided new information about an organism’s morphology. As technology developed, digital libraries began to proliferate, giving us almost unlimited access to valuable data, with methods such as computed tomography or CT and MRI scanning becoming powerful tools for studying the internal structure of such creatures.

“While powerful, MRI scanning and CT methods are prohibitively expensive. They also cannot collect vital information such as the color of the organism,” explains Yuichi Kano, associate professor of Kyushu University’s Graduate Education and Research Training Program in Decision Science for a Sustainable Society. “So we developed ‘bio-photogrammetry’ to integrate photogrammetry that can scan and render a high-quality 3D image of an organism.”

Photogrammetry is a method that allows you to get information and measurements about objects by analyzing photos or other images. Today it’s commonly used to scan everything from landscapes to sculptures to create 3D digital models, similar to Google Earth.

Kano used the same method to create thousands of models of different organisms.

“We hung the sample on a fishing line and took photos from different angles. We ended up taking hundreds of photos of the sample and feeding up to 500 of the best ones into the photogrammetry program,” explains Kano. “It’s similar to how the ‘Bullet Time’ sequences were filmed in the first Matrix movie, except instead of Keanu Reeves we use an octopus on a line surrounded by cameras.”

While Kano has worked on various organisms such as insects, plants and even fungi, his current focus is on aquatic animals such as fish and amphibians. To date, over 1,400 copies are available, all of which are free to use under the CC BY 4.0 license.

There are some limitations in the current methodology, such as B. Difficulty capturing transparent creatures or creating models of extremely small (<5 mm) or large (>1 m) organisms, but a few improvements in software and protocols could help solve such problems.

“I hope that this work will continue to grow and be used in different areas such as taxonomy, morphology and ecology. It’s free to the public, so you can use it in education or even hook it up to a VR machine and explore these organisms up close. I’d love to see what some people come up with,” Kano concludes.

For more information on this research, see “Bio-Photogrammetry: Digitally Archiving Colored 3D Morphology Data of Creatures and Associated Challenges,” Yuichi Kano, Research Ideas and Outcomes (2022). https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.8.e86985

About Kyushu University

Kyushu University has been one of Japan’s leading research-oriented universities since it was founded in 1911. Kyushu U’s world-class research centers, with around 19,000 students and 8,000 faculty and staff, cover a wide range of fields of study and research from the humanities and arts to engineering and medicine. Its numerous campuses – including the largest in Japan – are located near Fukuoka City, a coastal metropolis on the southwestern Japanese island of Kyushu, frequently ranked among the world’s most livable cities and historically known as the gateway to Asia.

astrobiology