Horticultural Temporal Fruit Monitoring via 3D Instance Segmentation and Re-Identification using Colored Point Clouds

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel 3D point cloud-based method for fruit instance segmentation and re-identification over time, improving accuracy in dynamic orchard environments.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach combining dense colored point clouds, deep learning-based segmentation, and attention-based matching for robust fruit tracking.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods in fruit segmentation accuracy.

Achieves higher re-identification precision across time.

Demonstrates effectiveness on real-world strawberry and apple datasets.

Abstract

Accurate and consistent fruit monitoring over time is a key step toward automated agricultural production systems. However, this task is inherently difficult due to variations in fruit size, shape, occlusion, orientation, and the dynamic nature of orchards where fruits may appear or disappear between observations. In this article, we propose a novel method for fruit instance segmentation and re-identification on 3D terrestrial point clouds collected over time. Our approach directly operates on dense colored point clouds, capturing fine-grained 3D spatial detail. We segment individual fruits using a learning-based instance segmentation method applied directly to the point cloud. For each segmented fruit, we extract a compact and discriminative descriptor using a 3D sparse convolutional neural network. To track fruits across different times, we introduce an attention-based matching network that associates fruits with their counterparts from previous sessions. Matching is performed using a probabilistic assignment scheme, selecting the most likely associations across time. We evaluate our approach on real-world datasets of strawberries and apples, demonstrating that it outperforms existing methods in both instance segmentation and temporal re-identification, enabling robust and precise fruit monitoring across complex and dynamic orchard environments. Keywords = Agricultural Robotics, 3D Fruit Tracking, Instance Segmentation, Deep Learning , Point Clouds, Sparse Convolutional Networks, Temporal Monitoring