AUTHOR=Qiao Gaofei , Zhang Zhibin , Niu Bin , Han Sijia , Yang Enhui 

TITLE=Plant stem and leaf segmentation and phenotypic parameter extraction using neural radiance fields and lightweight point cloud segmentation networks

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Plant Science

VOLUME=Volume 16 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/10.3389/fpls.2025.1491170

DOI=10.3389/fpls.2025.1491170

ISSN=1664-462X

ABSTRACT=High-quality 3D reconstruction and accurate 3D organ segmentation of plants are crucial prerequisites for automatically extracting phenotypic traits. In this study, we first extract a dense point cloud from implicit representations, which derives from reconstructing the maize plants in 3D by using the Nerfacto neural radiance field model. Second, we propose a lightweight point cloud segmentation network (PointSegNet) specifically for stem and leaf segmentation. This network includes a Global-Local Set Abstraction (GLSA) module to integrate local and global features and an Edge-Aware Feature Propagation (EAFP) module to enhance edge-awareness. Experimental results show that our PointSegNet achieves impressive performance compared to five other state-of-the-art deep learning networks, reaching 93.73%, 97.25%, 96.21%, and 96.73% in terms of mean Intersection over Union (mIoU), precision, recall, and F1-score, respectively. Even when dealing with tomato and soybean plants, with complex structures, our PointSegNet also achieves the best metrics. Meanwhile, based on the principal component analysis (PCA), we further optimize the method to obtain the parameters such as leaf length and leaf width by using PCA principal vectors. Finally, the maize stem thickness, stem height, leaf length, and leaf width obtained from our measurements are compared with the manual test results, yielding R2 values of 0.99, 0.84, 0.94, and 0.87, respectively. These results indicate that our method has high accuracy and reliability for phenotypic parameter extraction. This study throughout the entire process from 3D reconstruction of maize plants to point cloud segmentation and phenotypic parameter extraction, provides a reliable and objective method for acquiring plant phenotypic parameters and will boost plant phenotypic development in smart agriculture.