Plant-Denoising-Net (PDN): A plant point cloud denoising network based on density gradient field learning

Abstract

Effective point cloud denoising is critical in 3D plant phenotyping applications, which reduces interference in subsequent algorithms and improves the accuracy of plant phenotypes measurement. Deep learning-based point cloud denoising algorithms have shown excellent denoising performance on simple CAD models. However, these algorithms suffer from issues including over-smoothing or shrinkage and low efficiency when applied on density uneven, incomplete, various types of noise and complex plant point clouds. We proposed a plant point cloud denoising network (PDN) based on point cloud density gradient field learning, which can effectively address the challenges posed by plant point clouds. PDN consists of three main modules: point density feature (PDF) exception module, umbrella operator feature (UOF) computation module, and point density gradient (DG) estimation module. The performance of PDN was evaluated in experiments using point clouds of multiple plant species with noise of different types. Under different levels of Gaussian noise, our method achieved a relative performance improvement of 7.6%-19.3% compared to the state-of-the-art baseline methods, reaching state-of-the-art denoising performance. For noise of different types, the majority of our denoising results outperformed the baseline methods. In addition, our method was 0.5 and 8.6 times faster than the baseline methods when processing point clouds with low and high noise level, respectively. The good robustness, generalization, and computational efficacy of PDN are expected to facilitate the acquisition of high-precision 3D point clouds for various plant species, enhance the versatility of 3D phenotyping methods, improve the accuracy of the measurement of structural phenotypes, and increase the throughput of data processing, therefore facilitate the development of modern breeding research. The source code and the datasets used in this study is available on GitHub at https://github.com/suetme/PDN-plant-denoising-net.