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Abstract

Semantic segmentation of three-dimensional (3D) plant point clouds at the stem-leaf level is foundational and indispensable for high-throughput tomato phenotyping systems. However, existing semantic segmentation methods often suffer from issues such as low precision and slow inference speed. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative encoding-decoding structure, incorporating voxel sparse convolution (SpConv) and attention-based feature fusion (VSCAFF) to enhance semantic segmentation of the point clouds of high-resolution tomato seedling images. Tomato seedling point clouds from the Pheno4D dataset labeled into semantic classes of ‘leaf’, ‘stem’, and ‘soil’ are applied for the semantic segmentation. In order to reduce the number of parameters so as to further improve the inference speed, the SpConv module is designed to function through the residual concatenation of the skeleton convolution kernel and the regular convolution kernel. The feature fusion module based on the attention mechanism is designed by giving the corresponding attention weights to the voxel diffusion features and the point features in order to avoid the ambiguity of points with different semantics having the same characteristics caused by the diffusion module, in addition to suppressing noise. Finally, to solve model training class bias caused by the uneven distribution of point cloud classes, the composite loss function of Lovász-Softmax and weighted cross-entropy is introduced to supervise the model training and improve its performance. The results show that mIoU of VSCAFF is 86.96%, which outperformed the performance of PointNet, PointNet++, and DGCNN, respectively. IoU of VSCAFF achieves 99.63% in the soil class, 64.47% in the stem class, and 96.72% in the leaf class. The time delay of 35ms in inference speed is better than PointNet++ and DGCNN. The results demonstrate that VSCAFF has high performance and inference speed for semantic segmentation of high-resolution tomato point clouds, and can provide technical support for the high-throughput automatic phenotypic analysis of tomato plants.

Details

1009240
Company / organization
Title
Semantic Segmentation Method for High-Resolution Tomato Seedling Point Clouds Based on Sparse Convolution
Author
Li, Shizhao 1 ; Yan, Zhichao 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Ma, Boxiang 1 ; Guo, Shaoru 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Song, Hongxia 2 

 School of Computer and Information Technology, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, China; [email protected] (S.L.); [email protected] (Z.Y.); [email protected] (B.M.) 
 College of Horticulture, Shanxi Agricultural University, Jinzhong 030801, China; [email protected] 
Publication title
Volume
15
Issue
1
First page
74
Publication year
2025
Publication date
2025
Publisher
MDPI AG
Place of publication
Basel
Country of publication
Switzerland
Publication subject
e-ISSN
20770472
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
Document type
Journal Article
Publication history
 
 
Online publication date
2024-12-31
Milestone dates
2024-12-03 (Received); 2024-12-27 (Accepted)
Publication history
 
 
   First posting date
31 Dec 2024
ProQuest document ID
3153495173
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/semantic-segmentation-method-high-resolution/docview/3153495173/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.
Last updated
2025-02-03
Database
ProQuest One Academic