# Evaluating Mesh Reconstruction Methods for Crop Phenotyping

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16926 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16926/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [Modular Primitives for High-Performance Differentiable Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03277/) (2020)
- [GaussianShader: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Shading Functions for Reflective Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17977/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Opacity Fields: Efficient Adaptive Surface Reconstruction in Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10772/) (2024)
- [GaussianPro: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Progressive Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14650/) (2024)
- [Native and Compact Structured Latents for 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14692/) (2025)
- [RaDe-GS: Rasterizing Depth in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01467/) (2024)
- [Delicate Textured Mesh Recovery from NeRF via Adaptive Surface Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02091/) (2023)
- [Understanding SSIM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13846/) (2020)
- [A Formal Evaluation of PSNR as Quality Measurement Parameter for Image Segmentation Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07116/) (2016)
- [Domain-Size Pooling in Local Descriptors: DSP-SIFT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.8556/) (2014)
- [3DGS-to-PC: Convert a 3D Gaussian Splatting Scene into a Dense Point Cloud or Mesh](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07478/) (2025)
- [Fully Dynamic Algorithms for Chamfer Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16639/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Phenotyping an agricultural crop is crucial for studying its entire life cycle, as it provides vital insights to improve yield and, ultimately, food production. Doing the same for crops grown on remote sites is a challenge for the specialists who cannot be available on-site. 3D reconstruction techniques offer a promising solution to this problem by enabling crop digitization, allowing specialists to access the resulting 3D crop models from anywhere at any time. In this work, we evaluate recent 3D reconstruction pipelines for crop phenotyping. We focus on 7 mesh reconstruction pipelines and measure the fidelity and consistency of their outputs qualitatively and quantitatively. Our results suggest that the meshes produced by the GGGS, PGSR, and 2DGS are preferable to the other pipelines, owing to their quantitative metrics and visually pleasing outputs. The GGGS pipeline is better than the second-best pipeline (2DGS) by about 27% on the radar chart with 5 dimensions, namely, User ratings, Chamfer distance, LPIPS, PSNR, and SSIM.