Advanced imaging techniques for the study of plant growth and development

•Integration of imaging tools with genome-wide approaches and modeling.•Quantitative measurements to describe biological systems at cellular resolution over time.•Recent developments in the field of imaging.•Vision-based methods (2D high-throughput and non-destructive methods). A variety of imaging methodologies are being used to collect data for quantitative studies of plant growth and development from living plants. Multi-level data, from macroscopic to molecular, and from weeks to seconds, can be acquired. Furthermore, advances in parallelized and automated image acquisition enable the throughput to capture images from large populations of plants under specific growth conditions. Image-processing capabilities allow for 3D or 4D reconstruction of image data and automated quantification of biological features. These advances facilitate the integration of imaging data with genome-wide molecular data to enable systems-level modeling.