Biomass phenotyping of oilseed rape through UAV multi-view oblique imaging with 3DGS and SAM model

Abstract

Biomass estimation of oilseed rape is crucial for optimizing crop productivity and breeding strategies. While UAV-based imaging has advanced high-throughput phenotyping, current methods often rely on orthophoto images, which struggle with overlapping leaves and incomplete structural information in complex field environments. This study integrates 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for precise 3D reconstruction and biomass estimation of oilseed rape. UAV multi-view oblique images from 36 angles were used to perform 3D reconstruction, with the SAM module enhancing point cloud segmentation. The segmented point clouds were then converted into point cloud volumes, which were fitted to ground-measured biomass using linear regression. The results showed that 3DGS (7k and 30k iterations) provided high accuracy, with peak signal-to-noise ratios (PSNR) of 27.43 and 29.53 and training times of 7 and 49 minutes, respectively. This performance exceeded that of structure from motion (SfM) and mipmap Neural Radiance Fields (Mip-NeRF), demonstrating superior efficiency. The SAM module achieved high segmentation accuracy, with a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 0.961 and an F1-score of 0.980. Additionally, a comparison of biomass extraction models found the point cloud volume model to be the most accurate, with an determination coefficient (R2) of 0.976, root mean square error (RMSE) of 2.92 g/plant, and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 6.81%, outperforming both the plot crop volume and individual crop volume models. This study highlights the potential of combining 3DGS with multi-view UAV imaging for improved biomass phenotyping.

Plant phenotyping relevance

UAV多視点画像、3D再構成、SAMによる分割を統合し、ナタネのバイオマスを推定・検証する手法が研究の中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper describes UAV multi-view oblique imagery, ground-truth biomass measurements for 293 plots, and 3DGS/SAM segmentation annotations, but provides no public deposit or URL for any dataset, code, or model. The Data availability statement only offers data on request, so the paper-specific phenotyping assets are not

No evidence-backed public reproduction asset is currently recorded.