# PlantC2USeg: Cross-Scale Consistent Pre-Training for Few-Shot Unified Plant Point Cloud Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02860 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02860/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06604/) (2022)
- [PointGroup: Dual-Set Point Grouping for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01658/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Point Cloud Pre-Training via Occlusion Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01089/) (2020)
- [SGPN: Similarity Group Proposal Network for 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08588/) (2017)
- [Contrast with Reconstruct: Contrastive 3D Representation Learning Guided by Generative Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02318/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Aggregation for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02350/) (2021)
- [Autoencoders as Cross-Modal Teachers: Can Pretrained 2D Image Transformers Help 3D Representation Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08320/) (2022)
- [Semantic Instance Segmentation with a Discriminative Loss Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02551/) (2017)
- [PointGPT: Auto-regressively Generative Pre-training from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11487/) (2023)
- [Associatively Segmenting Instances and Semantics in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09852/) (2019)
- [Towards Compact 3D Representations via Point Feature Enhancement Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10726/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Patch Dependence for Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14391/) (2024)
- [PCP-MAE: Learning to Predict Centers for Point Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08753/) (2024)
- [VIBUS: Data-efficient 3D Scene Parsing with VIewpoint Bottleneck and Uncertainty-Spectrum Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11472/) (2022)
- [PST: Plant segmentation transformer for 3D point clouds of rapeseed plants at the podding stage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13082/) (2022)
- [Towards More Diverse and Challenging Pre-training for Point Cloud Learning: Self-Supervised Cross Reconstruction with Decoupled Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01250/) (2025)
- [Towards scalable organ level 3D plant segmentation: Bridging the data algorithm computing gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06329/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern crop breeding demands precise organ-level analysis for trait quantification, making plant point cloud segmentation (PPCS) increasingly important. However, conventional deep learning approaches rely heavily on densely annotated datasets that are labor-intensive to acquire. Unified PPCS adaptation from distribution-shifted examples with minimal additional training remains challenging. To address this, we propose PlantC2USeg, a deep transfer learning framework featuring cross-scale consistency learning to explicitly align features across spatial scales and an information-restricted decoding strategy that prevents reconstruction shortcuts and promotes robust adaptation. The resulting pre-training enables stable few-shot generalization across species and sensing conditions, while unified fine-tuning with inherited thresholds further reduces adaptation overhead. Under full supervision on Soybean3D, PlantC2USeg achieves the highest semantic IoU and instance mWCov among compared methods, at 91.91% and 94.62%. With 20 labeled samples, it leads both metrics at 89.78% and 90.27%; with only 10 samples, it retains the highest mWCov of 83.23% while achieving 83.19% IoU. Across HR3D, 10-shot transfer to tobacco, tomato, and sorghum averages 78.41% IoU and 79.42% mWCov, while 22-shot transfer to SYAU-Maize achieves the highest IoU and mRec at 92.75% and 93.51%. Furthermore, a leading category-averaged mIoU of 85.0% on ShapeNet Part demonstrates the framework's capability to handle diverse shape variations beyond agricultural domains. These results demonstrate that PlantC2USeg reduces overall adaptation effort under distribution shifts, enabling scalable plant phenotyping and transferable 3D representation learning beyond agriculture.