# A Survey on 3D Reconstruction Techniques in Plant Phenotyping: From Classical Methods to Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), and Beyond

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00737 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00737/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 115 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [Nerfstudio: A Modular Framework for Neural Radiance Field Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04264/) (2023)
- [MVSplat: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14627/) (2024)
- [FastNeRF: High-Fidelity Neural Rendering at 200FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10380/) (2021)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [Mega-NeRF: Scalable Construction of Large-Scale NeRFs for Virtual Fly-Throughs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10703/) (2021)
- [Gaussian Grouping: Segment and Edit Anything in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00732/) (2023)
- [SC-GS: Sparse-Controlled Gaussian Splatting for Editable Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14937/) (2023)
- [Point-Voxel CNN for Efficient 3D Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03739/) (2019)
- [Track Anything: Segment Anything Meets Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11968/) (2023)
- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03890/) (2024)
- [Editing Conditional Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06466/) (2021)
- [NeRF-Editing: Geometry Editing of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04978/) (2022)
- [GaussianPro: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Progressive Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14650/) (2024)
- [GPS-Gaussian: Generalizable Pixel-wise 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-time Human Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02155/) (2023)
- [Segment Any 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00860/) (2023)
- [NeRF: Neural Radiance Field in 3D Vision: A Comprehensive Review (Updated Post-Gaussian Splatting)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00379/) (2022)
- [Revising Densification in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06109/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Flying Object Detection with YOLOv8](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09972/) (2023)
- [FoV-NeRF: Foveated Neural Radiance Fields for Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16365/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting: Survey, Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17418/) (2024)
- [Human Performance Modeling and Rendering via Neural Animated Mesh](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08468/) (2022)
- [FACET: Fairness in Computer Vision Evaluation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00035/) (2023)
- [NeRF-LiDAR: Generating Realistic LiDAR Point Clouds with Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14811/) (2023)
- [RT-NeRF: Real-Time On-Device Neural Radiance Fields Towards Immersive AR/VR Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01120/) (2022)
- [TAPA-MVS: Textureless-Aware PAtchMatch Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10929/) (2019)
- [A Large-Scale Outdoor Multi-modal Dataset and Benchmark for Novel View Synthesis and Implicit Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06782/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [GaussianPlant: Structure-aligned Gaussian Splatting for 3D Reconstruction of Plants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14087/) (2025)
- [IPENS:Interactive Unsupervised Framework for Rapid Plant Phenotyping Extraction via NeRF-SAM2 Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13633/) (2025)
- [AgriChrono: A Multi-modal Dataset Capturing Crop Growth and Lighting Variability with a Field Robot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18694/) (2025)
- [Object-Centric 3D Gaussian Splatting for Strawberry Plant Reconstruction and Phenotyping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02207/) (2025)
- [Enhancing annotations for 5D apple pose estimation through 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20148/) (2025)
- [GrowFields: Compositional 4D Neural Fields for Topology-Changing Plant Growth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03330/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Plant phenotyping plays a pivotal role in understanding plant traits and their interactions with the environment, making it crucial for advancing precision agriculture and crop improvement. 3D reconstruction technologies have emerged as powerful tools for capturing detailed plant morphology and structure, offering significant potential for accurate and automated phenotyping. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the 3D reconstruction techniques for plant phenotyping, covering classical reconstruction methods, emerging Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), and the novel 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) approach. Classical methods, which often rely on high-resolution sensors, are widely adopted due to their simplicity and flexibility in representing plant structures. However, they face challenges such as data density, noise, and scalability. NeRF, a recent advancement, enables high-quality, photorealistic 3D reconstructions from sparse viewpoints, but its computational cost and applicability in outdoor environments remain areas of active research. The emerging 3DGS technique introduces a new paradigm in reconstructing plant structures by representing geometry through Gaussian primitives, offering potential benefits in both efficiency and scalability. We review the methodologies, applications, and performance of these approaches in plant phenotyping and discuss their respective strengths, limitations, and future prospects (https://github.com/JiajiaLi04/3D-Reconstruction-Plants). Through this review, we aim to provide insights into how these diverse 3D reconstruction techniques can be effectively leveraged for automated and high-throughput plant phenotyping, contributing to the next generation of agricultural technology.