As the world population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, our agricultural production system needs to double its productivity despite a decline of human workforce in the agricultural sector. Autonomous robotic systems are one promising pathway to increase productivity by taking over labor-intensive manual tasks like fruit picking. To be effective, such systems need to monitor and interact with plants and fruits precisely, which is challenging due to the cluttered nature of agricultural environments causing, for example, strong occlusions. Thus, being able to estimate the complete 3D shapes of objects in presence of occlusions is crucial for automating operations such as fruit harvesting. In this paper, we propose the first publicly available 3D shape completion dataset for agricultural vision systems. We provide an RGB-D dataset for estimating the 3D shape of fruits. Specifically, our dataset contains RGB-D frames of single sweet peppers in lab conditions but also in a commercial greenhouse. For each fruit, we additionally collected high-precision point clouds that we use as ground truth. For acquiring the ground truth shape, we developed a measuring process that allows us to record data of real sweet pepper plants, both in the lab and in the greenhouse with high precision, and determine the shape of the sensed fruits. We release our dataset, consisting of almost 7,000 RGB-D frames belonging to more than 100 different fruits. We provide segmented RGB-D frames, with camera intrinsics to easily obtain colored point clouds, together with the corresponding high-precision, occlusion-free point clouds obtained with a high-precision laser scanner. We additionally enable evaluation of shape completion approaches on a hidden test set through a public challenge on a benchmark server.

Crop yield estimation is a relevant problem in agriculture, because an accurate yield estimate can support farmers’ decisions on harvesting or precision intervention. Robots can help to automate this process. To do so, they need to be able to perceive the surrounding environment to identify target objects such as trees and plants. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to address the problem of hierarchical panoptic segmentation of apple orchards on 3D data from different sensors. Our approach is able to simultaneously provide semantic segmentation, instance segmentation of trunks and fruits, and instance segmentation of trees (a trunk with its fruits). This allows us to identify relevant information such as individual plants, fruits, and trunks, and capture the relationship among them, such as precisely estimate the number of fruits associated to each tree in an orchard. To efficiently evaluate our approach for hierarchical panoptic segmentation, we provide a dataset designed specifically for this task. Our dataset is recorded in Bonn, Germany, in a real apple orchard with a variety of sensors, spanning from a terrestrial laser scanner to a RGB-D camera mounted on different robots platforms. The experiments show that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art approaches in 3D panoptic segmentation in the agricultural domain, while also providing full hierarchical panoptic segmentation. Our dataset is publicly available at https://www.ipb.uni-bonn.de/data/hops/. The open-source implementation of our approach is available at https://github.com/PRBonn/hapt3D.

Robots that operate in agricultural environments need a robust perception system that can deal with occlusions, which are naturally present in agricultural scenarios. In this paper, we address the problem of estimating 3D shapes of fruits when only partial observations are available. Generally speaking, such a shape completion can be realized by exploiting prior knowledge about the geometry of the fruit. This is typically done by template matching using traditional optimization algorithms, which are slow but accurate, or by encoding such knowledge into the weights of a neural network, leading to faster but often less accurate estimates. Our approach combines the best of both worlds. It exploits the benefit of having a template representing our object of interest with the advantages of using a neural network to learn how to deform a template. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that our approach yields accurate estimation at a competitively low inference time in challenging greenhouse environments.

Agricultural production is facing challenges in the next decades induced by climate change and the need for more sustainability by reducing its impact on the environment. Advances in field management through robotic intervention, monitoring of crops by autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) supporting breeding of novel and more resilient crop varieties can help to address these challenges. The analysis of plant traits is called phenotyping and is an essential activity in plant breeding; it however involves a great amount of manual labor. With this paper, we provide means to better tackle the problems of instance segmentation to support robotic intervention and automatic fine-grained, organ-level geometric analysis needed for precision phenotyping. As the availability of real-world data in this domain is relatively scarce, we provide a novel dataset that was acquired using UAVs capturing high-resolution images of real breeding trials containing 48 plant varieties and therefore covering a relevant morphological and appearance spectrum. This enables the development of approaches for instance segmentation and autonomous phenotyping that generalize well to different plant varieties. Based on overlapping high-resolution images taken from multiple viewing angles, we provide photogrammetric dense point clouds and provide detailed and accurate point-wise labels for plants, leaves, and salient points as the tip and the base in 3D. Additionally, we include measurements of phenotypic traits performed by experts from the German Federal Plant Variety Office on the real plants, allowing the evaluation of new approaches not only on segmentation and keypoint detection but also directly on actual traits. The provided labeled point clouds enable finegrained plant analysis and support further progress in the development of automatic phenotyping approaches, but also enable further research in surface reconstruction, point cloud completion, and semantic interpretation of point clouds.

The production of food, feed, fiber, and fuel is a key task of agriculture, which has to cope with many challenges in the upcoming decades, e.g., a higher demand, climate change, lack of workers, and the availability of arable land. Vision systems can support making better and more sustainable field management decisions, but also support the breeding of new crop varieties by allowing temporally dense and reproducible measurements. Recently, agricultural robotics got an increasing interest in the vision and robotics communities since it is a promising avenue for coping with the aforementioned lack of workers and enabling more sustainable production. While large datasets and benchmarks in other domains are readily available and enable significant progress, agricultural datasets and benchmarks are comparably rare. We present an annotated dataset and benchmarks for the semantic interpretation of real agricultural fields. Our dataset recorded with a UAV provides high-quality, pixel-wise annotations of crops and weeds, but also crop leaf instances at the same time. Furthermore, we provide benchmarks for various tasks on a hidden test set comprised of different fields: known fields covered by the training data and a completely unseen field.

Crop inspection is a critical part of modern agricultural practices that helps farmers assess the current status of a field and then make crop management decisions. Current crop inspection methods are labour-intensive tasks, which makes them rather slow and expensive to apply. In this paper, we exploit recent advancements in implicit mapping to tackle the challenging context of agricultural environments to create dense maps of crop rows with high enough fidelity to be useful for automated crop inspection. Specifically, we map strawberry and sweet pepper crop rows using RGB images captured by a wheeled mobile field robot inside a greenhouse and then use this data to build 3D maps to document the development of plants and fruits. Our Target-Aware Implicit Mapping system (TAIM) uses a SLAM-based pose initialization strategy for robust pose convergence, an efficient information-guided training sample selection framework for faster loss reduction, and focuses on exploiting training samples for fruit regions of the scene, which are critical for crop inspection tasks, to create more accurate maps in less time.

Monitoring the traits of plants and fruits is a fundamental task in horticulture. With accurate measurements, farmers can predict the yield of their crops and use this information for making informed management decisions, and breeders can use it for variety selection. Agricultural robotic applications promise to automate this monitoring task. In this paper, we address the problem of monitoring fruit growth and investigate the matching of fruits recorded in commercial greenhouses at different growth stages based on data recorded from terrestrial laser scanners. This is challenging as fruits appear highly similar, change over time, and are subject to severe occlusions. We first propose a fruit descriptor, which captures the topology of the fruit surroundings to facilitate the matching between different points in time. We capture and describe the relationship between a fruit and its neighbors such that our descriptors are less affected by the growth over time. Furthermore, we define a matching cost function and use an optimal assignment algorithm to match the fruit observations taken in different weeks. The experiments show that our descriptor achieves a high spatio-temporal matching accuracy, which is superior to the commonly used geometric point cloud descriptors.

Monitoring plants and fruits at high resolution play a key role in the future of agriculture. Accurate 3D information can pave the way to a diverse number of robotic applications in agriculture ranging from autonomous harvesting to precise yield estimation. Obtaining such 3D information is non-trivial as agricultural environments are often repetitive and cluttered, and one has to account for the partial observability of fruit and plants. In this paper, we address the problem of jointly estimating complete 3D shapes of fruit and their pose in a 3D multi-resolution map built by a mobile robot. To this end, we propose an online multi-resolution panoptic mapping system where regions of interest are represented with a higher resolution. We exploit data to learn a general fruit shape representation that we use at inference time together with an occlusion-aware differentiable rendering pipeline to complete partial fruit observations and estimate the 7 DoF pose of each fruit in the map. The experiments presented in this paper, evaluated both in the controlled environment and in a commercial greenhouse, show that our novel algorithm yields higher completion and pose estimation accuracy than existing methods, with an improvement of 41 % in completion accuracy and 52 % in pose estimation accuracy while keeping a low inference time of 0.6 s in average.

Object-based maps are relevant for scene under-standing since they integrate geometric and semantic information of the environment, allowing autonomous robots to robustly localize and interact with on objects. In this paper, we address the task of constructing a metric-semantic map for the purpose of long-term object-based localization. We exploit 3D object detections from monocular RGB frames for both, the object-based map construction, and for globally localizing in the constructed map. To tailor the approach to a target environment, we propose an efficient way of generating 3D annotations to finetune the 3D object detection model. We evaluate our map construction in an office building, and test our long-term localization approach on challenging sequences recorded in the same environment over nine months. The experiments suggest that our approach is suitable for constructing metric-semantic maps, and that our localization approach is robust to long-term changes. Both, the mapping algorithm and the localization pipeline can run online on an onboard computer. We release an open-source C++/ros implementation of our approach.

Monitoring individual plants and computing precise 3D reconstructions is highly relevant for crop breeding. In the conventional breeding approach, humans measure phenotypic traits by hand, requiring substantial manual labor. This paper addresses precise 3D plant reconstructions in a crop field or breeding plot based on UAV imagery. We explicitly address the challenges resulting from the thin structures of leaves and naturally occurring self-occlusions. We combine photogrammetric bundle adjustment with a template-based matching approach and produce accurate 3D models that allow us to derive common, geometric traits used by breeders to phenotype plants. We provide a thorough experimental evaluation on commercially used sugar beet breeding plots to illustrate the capabilities of our method as well as its real world applicability.