Techniques for Canopy to Organ Level Plant Feature Extraction via Remote and Proximal Sensing: A Survey and Experiments

This paper presents an extensive review of techniques for plant feature extraction and segmentation, addressing the growing need for efficient plant phenotyping, which is increasingly recognized as a critical application for remote sensing in agriculture. As understanding and quantifying plant structures become essential for advancing precision agriculture and crop management, this survey explores a range of methodologies, both traditional and cutting-edge, for extracting features from plant images and point cloud data, as well as segmenting plant organs. The importance of accurate plant phenotyping in remote sensing is underscored, given its role in improving crop monitoring, yield prediction, and stress detection. The review highlights the challenges posed by complex plant morphologies and data noise, evaluating the performance of various techniques and emphasizing their strengths and limitations. The insights from this survey offer valuable guidance for researchers and practitioners in plant phenotyping, advancing the fields of plant science and agriculture. The experimental section focuses on three key tasks: 3D point cloud generation, 2D image-based feature extraction, and 3D shape classification, feature extraction, and segmentation. Comparative results are presented using collected plant data and several publicly available datasets, along with insightful observations and inspiring directions for future research.