GrowFields: Compositional 4D Neural Fields for Topology-Changing Plant Growth

Abstract

Quantifying plant growth dynamics from sparse longitudinal 3D observations is fundamental for agriculture and plant sciences. Yet, plants pose unique challenges: they undergo intricate non-rigid deformations, exhibit changing topology as new organs emerge, and often lack explicit temporal correspondences between consecutive data acquisitions due to newly formed tissue. Methods designed for general scenes struggle to model topology changes and asynchronous organ growth characteristic of plants. To address these challenges, we introduce GrowFields, a compositional dynamic neural field representation for organ-aware 4D plant growth modelling from point cloud time series. Our approach decomposes a plant into its constituent organs and aligns each organ into its own canonical coordinate frame, isolating intrinsic growth patterns from global plant motion. We then learn a shared continuous neural deformation field that models temporal dynamics across all organs, conditioned on learnable per-organ latent codes capturing organ identity and growth characteristics. The resulting modular yet unified representation naturally accommodates the asynchronous development of plant organs while remaining grounded in the practical setting of organ-level plant tracking. We evaluate GrowFields on growth sequences from four plant species, assessing geometric fitting and organ tracking accuracy using manually annotated leaf-tip trajectories. Results demonstrate consistent improvements in spatial precision, temporal coherence, and morphological fidelity over a range of existing representations.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物の3D時系列観測から器官追跡と成長動態を抽出する、オルガン認識型4Dニューラルフィールド手法の開発・評価が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper describes paper-specific assets (processed TrackPlant3D-derived sequences with 234 annotated leaf-tip points, author code, and trained 4D SIREN models), but they are only promised for future release, not yet publicly deposited. The project page is listed but the text explicitly states availability 'upon publi

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