From 3DGS scenes to plant traits: a scalable extraction and segmentation framework for muskmelon phenotyping

Automated quantification of plant-level development from multi-plant greenhouse scenes requires separating individual plants from shared scene-level reconstructions and quantifying organ-level development, a challenge that single-plant acquisition workflows do not directly address. This study presents an end-to-end phenotyping pipeline built on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and a post-reconstruction extraction framework, LCR-GS, designed to isolate plant instances from full greenhouse scenes without scene-specific model retraining. LCR-GS integrates zero-shot 2D cues with multi-view lifting, geometric clustering, and chromatic refinement to convert large scene-level reconstructions (~2M Gaussians) into compact per-plant subsets (~16K Gaussians). Experiments on greenhouse-grown muskmelon at the early vegetative stage demonstrate high plant-extraction precision (0.933) and strong organ-level instance segmentation (mean AP50 = 0.924). Plant height and leaf count are validated against manual measurements (height R² = 0.98, RMSE = 1.88 cm; leaf count R² = 0.86), whereas additional morphological traits, including leaf area, leaf area index, mean internode length, and stem node count, are reported as pipeline-derived descriptors for within-cohort comparison. By decoupling semantic inference from reconstruction, the pipeline reduces scene-scale data by over 99% and provides a practical route to derive compact per-plant 3D representations from multi-plant greenhouse imagery for downstream organ-level analysis.