Cotton field population phenotyping analysis based on 3D Gaussian reconstruction and dynamic spatial constraints

Introduction High-throughput field phenotyping (HTFP) holds great potential for elucidating the relationship between genomes and phenotypes. However, obtaining high-quality three-dimensional point cloud data of field populations and achieving single-plant phenotypic analysis remain challenging. Methods This study develops an integrated framework for field crop reconstruction based on 3D Gaussian splatting, incorporating a geometry-aware dynamic constraint algorithm to achieve instance segmentation and extract key phenotypic traits of individual plants. Using 3D Gaussian splatting technology, field-scale cotton population modeling is accomplished, generating dense 3D point clouds for regions of interest. Furthermore, the concept of a crop localization domain is proposed, establishing a longitudinal mapping that associates plant positional coordinates with long-term phenotypic attributes. Finally, through a dynamic spatial constraint mechanism, the accuracy and computational efficiency of instance segmentation for crop population point clouds are significantly improved, enabling rapid extraction of individual plant traits such as cotyledon node height, plant height, and leaf area. Results The results demonstrate that PhenotypeAI successfully reconstructed nine cotton populations with PSNR exceeding 30.0 dB. It successfully extracted regions of interest from 403 cotton plants, achieving an average F-score of 91.32% for instance segmentation and an average accuracy of 91.35%. The extracted traits—cotyledon node height, plant height, and leaf area—exhibited strong correlations with manual measurements, with coefficients of determination ( R 2 ) of 0.90, 0.91, and 0.91, respectively. Discussion The proposed method provides a low-cost solution for high-throughput field phenotypic analysis of field cotton and improves the efficiency of cotton breeding.