MaizeField3D: A curated 3D point cloud and procedural model dataset of field-grown maize from a diversity panel.

Abstract

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) based tools for 3D phenotyping, especially for maize, has been limited due to the lack of large and diverse 3D datasets. 2D image datasets fail to capture essential structural details such as leaf architecture, plant volume, and spatial arrangements that 3D data provide. To address this limitation, we present MaizeField3D (website), a curated dataset of 3D point clouds of field-grown maize plants from a diverse genetic panel, designed to be AI-ready for advancing agricultural research. Our dataset includes 1045 high-quality point clouds of field-grown maize collected using a terrestrial laser scanner (TLS). Point clouds of 520 plants from this dataset were segmented and annotated using a graph-based segmentation method to isolate individual leaves and stalks, ensuring consistent labeling across all samples. This labeled data was then used for fitting procedural models that provide a structured parametric representation of the maize plants. The leaves of the maize plants in the procedural models are represented using Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) surfaces that were generated using a two-step optimization process combining gradient-free and gradient-based methods. We conducted rigorous manual quality control on all datasets, correcting errors in segmentation, ensuring accurate leaf ordering, and validating metadata annotations. The dataset also includes metadata detailing plant morphology and quality, alongside multi-resolution subsampled point cloud data (100k, 50k, 10k points), which can be readily used for different downstream computational tasks. MaizeField3D will serve as a comprehensive foundational dataset for AI-driven phenotyping, plant structural analysis, and 3D applications in agricultural research.

Plant phenotyping relevance

3D点群の収集・分割・注釈・手続き型モデル化を中核とする、植物表現型解析向けの再利用可能なデータセットである。

Code and data availability

The paper's own MaizeField3D dataset (1045 TLS point clouds, 520 segmented/annotated plants, metadata, STL/DAT procedural model outputs) is publicly available on Hugging Face, with a project website and public GitHub code for the procedural NURBS surface generation used in the analysis.