arXiv · 2609.07724
Zero-Shot 3D Plant Organ Segmentation with SAM3 and Semantic NeRFs
Abstract
Accurate 3D plant organ segmentation is fundamental to automated phenotyping. Existing approaches rely on annotated training data or species-specific model configurations. We present an annotation-free pipeline for 3D plant organ segmentation, combining text-prompted SAM3 segmentation with semantic neural radiance fields (NeRFs). Given only multi-view RGB images and a list of class names, our zero-shot pipeline produces semantically labeled 3D point clouds without manual annotation, per-species fine-tuning, or domain-specific preprocessing. Multi-view NeRF fusion acts as effective implicit consensus mechanism that lifts imperfect per-frame masks into accurate 3D labels. On a controlled Begonia maculata testbed the SAM3 pipeline achieves 92.6% mIoU, reaching 95.9% of the oracle upper bound established with perfect ground-truth masks. The pipeline was further evaluated on a new dataset spanning ten diverse plant point clouds reaching an average 0.856 mIoU, with leaf and pot IoU above 0.91 and 0.90 for every species, respectively. These results demonstrate that annotation-free 3D plant organ segmentation is now feasible and approaching the range of supervised methods.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Andreas Gilson, Laura Hennig, Peter Pietrzyk. 2026-09-07. Zero-Shot 3D Plant Organ Segmentation with SAM3 and Semantic NeRFs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07724
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.
Discover connections
Connections use source metadata and explicit phrase matches, not verified experimental comparisons.