arXiv · 2610.03468
A Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based Pipeline for End-to-End Procedural Modeling of Field-Grown Maize from Point Clouds
Abstract
Editable 3D models of field-grown crops support high-throughput phenotyping and in silico breeding trials, but building them from scanned point clouds requires organ-level segmentation and fitting. Procedural generators can turn an organ-level parameter set into an analysis-suitable 3D model, but obtaining that set requires hours of manual tuning per plant or segmentation models trained on species-specific labels. We present an automated pipeline that reconstructs procedural maize models from raw 3D point clouds without manual tuning or species-specific training data. A multimodal vision-language model (VLM) annotates leaf midlines in rendered orthographic views. Deterministic geometric algorithms back-project the annotations onto the point cloud, merge them into 3D leaves by cross-view consensus, and grow the midlines to full blades on an orientation-weighted surface graph. Measured organ parameters populate a plant descriptor for a Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS)-based procedural model generator. Each leaf surface is then refined against its scan points by differentiable NURBS fitting. The pipeline reached a median whole-plant Chamfer distance of 5.4 mm on 100 genotypically diverse field-grown maize plants from the MaizeField3D dataset. The reconstructions were closer to the scans than those of an earlier semi-automated pipeline based on manual annotations. The pipeline recovered 1,017 of 1,023 (99.4%) curated reference leaves at an intersection-over-union of at least 0.5 without using those labels as input. These results show that VLM annotations become usable organ-level measurements when downstream geometric stages can correct them. This makes automated generation of editable 3D plant assets feasible at the scale of modern phenotyping experiments.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Mozhgan Hadadi, Talukder Z. Jubery, Adarsh Krishnamurthy, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian. 2026-10-02. A Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based Pipeline for End-to-End Procedural Modeling of Field-Grown Maize from Point Clouds. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03468
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.