James Burridge

Pieter M. Blok, Federico Magistri, Cyrill Stachniss et al.

Potato yield is an important metric for farmers to further optimize their cultivation practices. Potato yield can be estimated on a harvester using an RGB-D camera that can estimate the three-dimensional (3D) volume of individual potato tubers. A challenge, however, is that the 3D shape derived from RGB-D images is only partially completed, underestimating the actual volume. To address this issue, we developed a 3D shape completion network, called CoRe++, which can complete the 3D shape from RGB-D images. CoRe++ is a deep learning network that consists of a convolutional encoder and a decoder. The encoder compresses RGB-D images into latent vectors that are used by the decoder to complete the 3D shape using the deep signed distance field network (DeepSDF). To evaluate our CoRe++ network, we collected partial and complete 3D point clouds of 339 potato tubers on an operational harvester in Japan. On the 1425 RGB-D images in the test set (representing 51 unique potato tubers), our network achieved a completion accuracy of 2.8 mm on average. For volumetric estimation, the root mean squared error (RMSE) was 22.6 ml, and this was better than the RMSE of the linear regression (31.1 ml) and the base model (36.9 ml). We found that the RMSE can be further reduced to 18.2 ml when performing the 3D shape completion in the center of the RGB-D image. With an average 3D shape completion time of 10 milliseconds per tuber, we can conclude that CoRe++ is both fast and accurate enough to be implemented on an operational harvester for high-throughput potato yield estimation. CoRe++'s high-throughput and accurate processing allows it to be applied to other tuber, fruit and vegetable crops, thereby enabling versatile, accurate and real-time yield monitoring in precision agriculture. Our code, network weights and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/UTokyo-FieldPhenomics-Lab/corepp.git.

Pieter M. Blok, Haozhou Wang, Hyun Kwon Suh et al.

Potato yield is a key indicator for optimizing cultivation practices in agriculture. Potato yield can be estimated on harvesters using RGB-D cameras, which capture three-dimensional (3D) information of individual tubers moving along the conveyor belt. However, point clouds reconstructed from RGB-D images are incomplete due to self-occlusion, leading to systematic underestimation of tuber weight. To address this, we introduce PointRAFT, a high-throughput point cloud regression network that directly predicts continuous 3D shape properties, such as tuber weight, from partial point clouds. Rather than reconstructing full 3D geometry, PointRAFT infers target values directly from raw 3D data. Its key architectural novelty is an object height embedding that incorporates tuber height as an additional geometric cue, improving weight prediction under practical harvesting conditions. PointRAFT was trained and evaluated on 26,688 partial point clouds collected from 859 potato tubers across four cultivars and three growing seasons on an operational harvester in Japan. On a test set of 5,254 point clouds from 172 tubers, PointRAFT achieved a mean absolute error of 12.0 g and a root mean squared error of 17.2 g, substantially outperforming a linear regression baseline and a standard PointNet++ regression network. With an average inference time of 6.3 ms per point cloud, PointRAFT supports processing rates of up to 150 tubers per second, meeting the high-throughput requirements of commercial potato harvesters. Beyond potato weight estimation, PointRAFT provides a versatile regression network applicable to a wide range of 3D phenotyping and robotic perception tasks. The code, network weights, and a subset of the dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/pieterblok/pointraft.git.

Shuai Xiang, Wei Guo, James Burridge et al.

Vision Foundation Models (VFM) pre-trained on large-scale unlabeled data have achieved remarkable success on general computer vision tasks, yet typically suffer from significant domain gaps when applied to agriculture. In this context, we introduce $SPROUT$ ($S$calable $P$lant $R$epresentation model via $O$pen-field $U$nsupervised $T$raining), a multi-crop, multi-task agricultural foundation model trained via diffusion denoising. SPROUT leverages a VAE-free Pixel-space Diffusion Transformer to learn rich, structure-aware representations through denoising and enabling efficient end-to-end training. We pre-train SPROUT on a curated dataset of 2.6 million high-quality agricultural images spanning diverse crops, growth stages, and environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SPROUT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art web-pretrained and agricultural foundation models across a wide range of downstream tasks, while requiring substantially lower pre-training cost. The code and model are available at https://github.com/UTokyo-FieldPhenomics-Lab/SPROUT.

Shuai Xiang, Pieter M. Blok, James Burridge et al.

Object detection has wide applications in agriculture, but domain shifts of diverse environments limit the broader use of the trained models. Existing domain adaptation methods usually require retraining the model for new domains, which is impractical for agricultural applications due to constantly changing environments. In this paper, we propose DODA ($D$iffusion for $O$bject-detection $D$omain Adaptation in $A$griculture), a diffusion-based framework that can adapt the detector to a new domain in just 2 minutes. DODA incorporates external domain embeddings and an improved layout-to-image approach, allowing it to generate high-quality detection data for new domains without additional training. We demonstrate DODA's effectiveness on the Global Wheat Head Detection dataset, where fine-tuning detectors on DODA-generated data yields significant improvements across multiple domains. DODA provides a simple yet powerful solution for agricultural domain adaptation, reducing the barriers for growers to use detection in personalised environments. The code is available at https://github.com/UTokyo-FieldPhenomics-Lab/DODA.