MotionLeaf: Fine-grained Multi-Leaf Damped Vibration Monitoring for Plant Water Stress using Low-Cost mmWave Sensors

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce MotionLeaf , a novel mmWave base multi-point vibration frequency measurement system that can estimate plant stress by analyzing the surface vibrations of multiple leaves. MotionLeaf features a novel signal processing pipeline that accurately estimates fine-grained damped vibration frequencies based on noisy micro-displacement measurements from a mmWave radar. Specifically we explore the Interquartile Mean (IQM) of coherent phase differences from neighboring Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar chirps to calculate micro-displacements. Furthermore, we use the measurements from multiple received antennas in the radar to estimate the vibration signals of different leaves via a Blind Source Separation (BSS) method. Experimental results demonstrate that MotionLeaf can accurately measure the frequency of multiple leaves in a plant with average error of 0.0176 Hz, which is less than 50% of that (0.0416 Hz) of the state-of-the-art approach (mmVib). Additionally, the estimated natural vibration frequencies from MotionLeaf are shown to be an excellent feature to detect the water stress in the plant during 7-day drought experiments.