# GaussianPlant: Structure-aligned Gaussian Splatting for 3D Reconstruction of Plants

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14087 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14087/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Splatting SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06741/) (2023)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [Feature 3DGS: Supercharging 3D Gaussian Splatting to Enable Distilled Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03203/) (2023)
- [Text-to-3D using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16585/) (2023)
- [GaussianAvatar: Towards Realistic Human Avatar Modeling from a Single Video via Animatable 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02134/) (2023)
- [High-quality Surface Reconstruction using Gaussian Surfels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17774/) (2024)
- [GeoGaussian: Geometry-aware Gaussian Splatting for Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11324/) (2024)
- [JAFAR: Jack up Any Feature at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11136/) (2025)
- [Wheat3DGS: In-field 3D Reconstruction, Instance Segmentation and Phenotyping of Wheat Heads with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06978/) (2025)
- [A Survey on 3D Reconstruction Techniques in Plant Phenotyping: From Classical Methods to Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00737/) (2025)
- [GrowSplat: Constructing Temporal Digital Twins of Plants with Gaussian Splats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10923/) (2025)
- [NeuraLeaf: Neural Parametric Leaf Models with Shape and Deformation Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12714/) (2025)
- [PlantDreamer: Achieving Realistic 3D Plant Models with Diffusion-Guided Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15528/) (2025)
- [TreeFormer: Single-view Plant Skeleton Estimation via Tree-constrained Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16132/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [GrowFields: Compositional 4D Neural Fields for Topology-Changing Plant Growth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03330/) (2026)
- [PlantRig - From Bones to Branches: Adaptation of Autoregressive Rigging Models for Plant Skeletal Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01072/) (2026)
- [Structure-aware Riemannian Growth Fields for 4D Plant Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13007/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a method for jointly recovering the appearance and internal structure of botanical plants from multi-view images based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). While 3DGS exhibits robust reconstruction of scene appearance for novel-view synthesis, it lacks structural representations underlying those appearances (e.g., branching patterns of plants), which limits its applicability to tasks such as plant phenotyping. To achieve both high-fidelity appearance and structural reconstruction, we introduce GaussianPlant, a hierarchical 3DGS representation, which disentangles structure and appearance. Specifically, we employ structure primitives (StPs) to explicitly represent branch and leaf geometry, and appearance primitives (ApPs) to the plants' appearance using 3D Gaussians. StPs represent a simplified structure of the plant, i.e., modeling branches as cylinders and leaves as disks. To accurately distinguish the branches and leaves, StP's attributes (i.e., branches or leaves) are optimized in a self-organized manner. ApPs are bound to each StP to represent the appearance of branches or leaves as in conventional 3DGS. StPs and ApPs are jointly optimized using a re-rendering loss on the input multi-view images, as well as the gradient flow from ApP to StP using the binding correspondence information. We conduct experiments to qualitatively evaluate the reconstruction accuracy of both appearance and structure, as well as real-world experiments to qualitatively validate the practical performance. Experiments show that the GaussianPlant achieves both high-fidelity appearance reconstruction via ApPs and accurate structural reconstruction via StPs, enabling the extraction of branch structure and leaf instances.