A Corn Point Cloud Stem-Leaf Segmentation Method Based on Octree Voxelization and Region Growing

Abstract

Plant phenotyping is crucial for advancing precision agriculture and modern breeding, with 3D point cloud segmentation of plant organs being essential for phenotypic parameter extraction. Nevertheless, although existing approaches maintain segmentation precision, they struggle to efficiently process complex geometric configurations and large-scale point cloud datasets, significantly increasing computational costs. Furthermore, their heavy reliance on high-quality annotated data restricts their use in high-throughput settings. To address these limitations, we propose a novel multi-stage region-growing algorithm based on an octree structure for efficient stem-leaf segmentation in maize point cloud data. The method first extracts key geometric features through octree voxelization, significantly improving segmentation efficiency. In the region-growing phase, a preliminary structural segmentation strategy using fitted cylinder parameters is applied. A refinement strategy is then applied to improve segmentation accuracy in complex regions. Finally, stem segmentation consistency is enhanced through central axis fitting and distance-based filtering. In this study, we utilize the Pheno4D dataset, which comprises three-dimensional point cloud data of maize plants at different growth stages, collected from greenhouse environments. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves an average precision of 98.15% and an IoU of 84.81% on the Pheno4D dataset, demonstrating strong robustness across various growth stages. Segmentation time per instance is reduced to 4.8 s, offering over a fourfold improvement compared to PointNet while maintaining high accuracy and efficiency. Additionally, validation experiments on tomato point cloud data confirm the proposed method’s strong generalization capability. In this paper, we present an algorithm that addresses the shortcomings of traditional methods in complex agricultural environments. Specifically, our approach improves efficiency and accuracy while reducing dependency on high-quality annotated data. This solution not only delivers high precision and faster computational performance but also lays a strong technical foundation for high-throughput crop management and precision breeding.

Plant phenotyping relevance

トウモロコシの3D点群から茎・葉を分割し、表現型パラメータ抽出を可能にするアルゴリズムを開発・検証しており、植物フェノタイピング手法が研究の中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper's stem-leaf segmentation experiments are performed on the public Pheno4D maize/tomato point cloud dataset, which the authors explicitly state is publicly available at the IPB Bonn URL. No author analysis code or trained models are reported as publicly released.