ZCAT: Zero-shot cross-crop annotation transfer-A new paradigm leveraging plant organ similarity

The inflorescence is a key yield-determining organ, yet its complex morphology makes manual pixel-level annotation time-consuming, leading to a scarcity of high-quality segmentation datasets. To address this bottleneck, we propose ZCAT (Zero-shot Cross-crop Annotation Transfer), a novel paradigm for zero-annotation cross-crop pseudo-mask screening. ZCAT completely eliminates pixel-level manual annotation of the target crop, requiring only holistic quality assessment of model-generated pseudo-masks (5-10 s per image). Specifically, we train a SegFormer model on public rice panicle datasets (CVRP and RiceSEG) and transfer it across crops to the wheat spike segmentation task. The key innovation is the introduction of a human-defined quality function Q, which circumvents the fundamental challenge in self-learning algorithms: the inability of computers to autonomously distinguish good masks from bad ones. Through iterative human-in-the-loop pseudo-label screening with a curriculum learning strategy, each round adds only a few high-quality pseudo-masks to the training set, continuously improving model performance. After four iterations, ZCAT produces pseudo-masks with an average Spike IoU of 0.7003, evaluated against the GWFSS manual annotations as ground truth. Moreover, the pseudo-mask dataset exhibited higher benchmark performance than the GWFSS manual annotations (Spike IoU 0.7612 vs. 0.7027; mIoU 0.8627 vs. 0.8247), suggesting stronger self-consistency. A generalization test on a strictly held-out set of 100 manually annotated wheat spike images showed that the model trained on ZCAT-generated pseudo-masks achieved marginally better performance than that trained on the GWFSS manual annotations (Spike IoU: 0.5112 vs. 0.4927; mIoU: 0.5627 vs. 0.5247). The time budget of the ZCAT pipeline was substantially lower than that of manual annotation. ZCAT opens a new pathway for rapid annotation of plant reproductive structures or other organs and significantly reduces data preparation costs in plant phenomics. The generated wheat spike pseudo-mask dataset and the mask quality screening tool (Mask Quality Screener) are open-sourced.