AgriField3D: A Curated 3D Point Cloud Dataset of Field-Grown Plants from a Maize Diversity Panel

Iowa State University

*Equal Contribution
AgriField3D

Abstract

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in three-dimensional (3D) agricultural research, particularly for maize, has been limited by the scarcity of large-scale, diverse datasets. While 2D image datasets are abundant, they 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 AgriField3D, 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 comprises over 1,000 high-quality point clouds collected using a Terrestrial Laser Scanner, complemented by procedural models that provide structured, parametric representations of maize plants. These procedural models, generated using Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) and optimized via a two-step process combining Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and differentiable programming, enable precise, scalable reconstructions of leaf surfaces and plant architectures. To enhance usability, we performed graph-based segmentation to isolate individual leaves and stalks, ensuring consistent labeling across all samples. We also conducted rigorous manual quality control on all datasets, correcting errors in segmentation, ensuring accurate leaf ordering, and validating metadata annotations. The dataset further includes metadata detailing plant morphology and quality, alongside multi-resolution subsampled versions (100k, 50k, 10k points) optimized for various computational needs. By integrating point cloud data of field grown plants with high-fidelity procedural models and ensuring meticulous manual validation, AgriField3D provides a comprehensive foundation for AI-driven phenotyping, plant structural analysis, and 3D applications in agricultural research.

Dataset Features

  • 1,045 quality-controlled 3D point clouds of diverse field-grown maize plants.
  • Organ-level annotations with detailed semantic and instance segmentation, enabling precise plant structure analysis.
  • AI-compatible formats, ensuring seamless integration with advanced ML models.
  • Color information, enhancing data interpretability.
  • Procedurally generated maize leaf models, providing a NURBS surface-based representation that is beneficial for downstream tasks.
  • Multiple subsampled versions (100k, 50k, and 10k points per cloud), supporting a range of computational requirements.
Comparison Table

Samples from the Dataset

Sample

Examples of maize plant point clouds from the dataset, showcasing the original data. These images highlight the diverse morphologies of maize plants captured using terrestrial laser scanning.

Sample Gif 1
Sample Gif 2
Sample Gif 3

Examples of segmented maize plant point clouds from the dataset, showcasing the color-coded segmentation data.

Sample Gif 1
Sample Gif 2
Sample Gif 3

Samples plants from the procedurally generated maize leaf models, providing a NURBS surface-based representation that is beneficial for downstream tasks.

Comparison Table

Comparison of histograms showing the mean point to point distances for the dataset downsampled to 100K points, 50K points and 10K points.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the AI Research Institutes program [AI Institute: for Resilient Agriculture (AIIRA), Award No.2021-67021-35329]from the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. We acknowledge support from Iowa State University Plant Science Institute. YL was supported in part by NSF grants (DBI-1661475 and IOS-1842097) to PSS and others and a scholarship from the China Scholarship Council.

Team

BibTeX

@inproceedings{kimara2025agriField3D,
  title={AgriField3D: A Curated 3D Point Cloud Dataset of Field-Grown Plants from a Maize Diversity Panel}, 
  author={Elvis Kimara1, Mozhgan Hadadi, Jackson Godbersen, Aditya Balu, Talukder Jubery, Yawei Li, Adarsh Krishnamurthy, Patrick Schnable, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian},
  booktitle={Arxiv},
  year={2025},
  primaryClass={cs.CV},
  url={}
}