PlantSegNeRF: A few-shot, cross-dataset method for plant 3D instance point cloud reconstruction via joint-channel NeRF with multi-view image instance matching

Organ segmentation of plant point clouds is a prerequisite for the high-resolution and accurate extraction of organ-level phenotypic traits. Although the fast development of deep learning has boosted much research on segmentation of plant point clouds, the existing techniques for organ segmentation still face limitations in resolution, segmentation accuracy, and generalizability across various plant species. In this study, we proposed a novel approach called plant segmentation neural radiance fields (PlantSegNeRF), aiming to directly generate high-precision instance point clouds from multi-view RGB image sequences for a wide range of plant species. PlantSegNeRF performed 2D instance segmentation on the multi-view images to generate instance masks for each organ with a corresponding ID. The multi-view instance IDs corresponding to the same plant organ were then matched and refined using a specially designed instance matching module. The instance NeRF was developed to render an implicit scene, containing color, density, semantic and instance information. The implicit scene was ultimately converted into high-precision plant instance point clouds based on the volume density. The results proved that in semantic segmentation of point clouds, PlantSegNeRF outperformed the commonly used methods, demonstrating an average improvement of 16.1%, 18.3%, 17.8%, and 24.2% in precision, recall, F1-score, and IoU compared to the second-best results on structurally complex datasets. More importantly, PlantSegNeRF exhibited significant advantages in plant point cloud instance segmentation tasks. Across all plant datasets, it achieved average improvements of 11.7%, 38.2%, 32.2% and 25.3% in mPrec, mRec, mCov, mWCov, respectively. This study extends the organ-level plant phenotyping and provides a high-throughput way to supply high-quality 3D data for the development of large-scale models in plant science.