Stem–Leaf segmentation and phenotypic trait extraction of individual plant using a precise and efficient point cloud segmentation network

Rapid and precise 3D organ segmentation is crucial for the automatic extraction of phenotypic traits, forming a fundamental prerequisite for intelligent plant breeding. The advancement of deep learning technology has replaced labor-intensive manual measurements and traditional computer vision methods, which are sensitive to parameters, in phenotypic trait extraction. However, current larger network structures not only require extensive point cloud data but also consume substantial computational resources, rendering them unsuitable for agricultural tasks with limited plant samples. Therefore, this study developed a lightweight 3D deep learning network (PEPNet) that achieves precise plant organ segmentation and stem-leaf phenotypic trait extraction. The adopted simple-but-effective network architecture and innovative modern operations, including a high-dimensional feature mapping strategy for preprocessing input points, a local feature extraction module based on inverted residual bottleneck block, and a cost-free attention block for spatial feature fusion, effectively implement multi-scale hierarchies and adaptively reduce computational overheads. Experimental results from cotton stem-leaf segmentation demonstrated that PEPNet not only presented approximately 2 × faster inference speed (9.59 ms) and throughput (146.32 plants per second) but also achieved competitive segmentation performance compared to other six state-of-the-art deep learning networks, namely PointNet++, DGCNN, CurveNet, Point Cloud Transformer, PointMLP, and SPoTr, achieving 95.99 %, 94.66 %, 95.32 %, and 91.31 % in Precision, Recall, F1-score, and mIoU, respectively. In transferability experiments with tomato and soybean plants, PEPNet achieved almost all the best metrics and significantly outperformed the second-best model (CurveNet). Furthermore, ablation study verified the optimal trade-off between efficiency and accuracy in this network. Any modifications to the modules could potentially disrupt the optimal trade-off. This work could contribute to reducing computational resources and annotation costs for applying segmentation methods in high-throughput phenotyping tasks.