From 3DGS scenes to plant traits: a scalable extraction and segmentation framework for muskmelon phenotyping

Abstract

Automated quantification of plant-level development from multi-plant greenhouse scenes requires separating individual plants from shared scene-level reconstructions and quantifying organ-level development, a challenge that single-plant acquisition workflows do not directly address. This study presents an end-to-end phenotyping pipeline built on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and a post-reconstruction extraction framework, LCR-GS, designed to isolate plant instances from full greenhouse scenes without scene-specific model retraining. LCR-GS integrates zero-shot 2D cues with multi-view lifting, geometric clustering, and chromatic refinement to convert large scene-level reconstructions (~2M Gaussians) into compact per-plant subsets (~16K Gaussians). Experiments on greenhouse-grown muskmelon at the early vegetative stage demonstrate high plant-extraction precision (0.933) and strong organ-level instance segmentation (mean AP50 = 0.924). Plant height and leaf count are validated against manual measurements (height R² = 0.98, RMSE = 1.88 cm; leaf count R² = 0.86), whereas additional morphological traits, including leaf area, leaf area index, mean internode length, and stem node count, are reported as pipeline-derived descriptors for within-cohort comparison. By decoupling semantic inference from reconstruction, the pipeline reduces scene-scale data by over 99% and provides a practical route to derive compact per-plant 3D representations from multi-plant greenhouse imagery for downstream organ-level analysis.

Plant phenotyping relevance

3DGS画像から個体・器官を抽出し、植物形質を定量化するフェノタイピング手法の開発と検証が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper's Data Availability Statement points to a public GitHub repository containing the muskmelon 3DGS phenotyping dataset (scenes, Gaussian-level plant/background annotations, and point-level organ labels) used in this study.