I am a Graduate Research Student (Master’s) in the Mineno Laboratory at Shizuoka University, working at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and precision agriculture. My research asks a deceptively simple question: how can a grower track how a crop is growing—reliably, across an entire season—without expensive sensors or manual labour?

My thesis, “Autonomous Data Acquisition and Scale-Invariant Phenotyping for Time-Series Crop Monitoring in Greenhouse Environments,” tackles this from both ends: an autonomous, self-charging ground vehicle that captures consistent multi-view video, and a measurement method that extracts plant traits in render-space, where the per-session scale ambiguity of Structure-from-Motion cancels by construction—no calibration targets required. The work has been validated over a full 49-day crop cycle in a real commercial greenhouse and disseminated across three peer-reviewed venues.

Research interests

• Scale-invariant phenotyping — measuring plant traits in normalized image-space, where perspective projection cancels the per-session scale ambiguity of SfM.
• 3D Gaussian Splatting & neural rendering — high-fidelity, real-time crop reconstruction, and extensions toward 4D (temporal) growth.
• Autonomous agricultural robotics — low-cost, self-charging UGVs with vision-based navigation and autonomous docking for operator-free data acquisition.
• Time-series crop monitoring — longitudinal growth analysis and management-event detection in commercial greenhouses.

Highlights

• 2.86× improvement in cross-session measurement stability (CV 28.0% → 9.8%)
• 49 days of validation in a real commercial greenhouse
• A sub-$3000, open, autonomous acquisition platform
• 3 peer-reviewed venues (IEEE GCCE 2025, ISFAR-SU 2026, COMPAG under review)

Currently

• Finalising my master’s thesis (2026) and preparing to continue into the PhD program.
• Journal manuscript under review (Computers and Electronics in Agriculture).
• Extending render-space measurement toward 4D Gaussian Splatting for dynamic growth.

I am always happy to talk about plant phenotyping, 3D reconstruction, or agricultural robotics. Feel free to reach me at zobaer.al.24@shizuoka.ac.jp.