DCSFormer: a high-precision method for cotton seedling point cloud organ segmentation.

Abstract

Introduction: Accurately segmenting cotton seedling organs from 3D point clouds is fundamental for high-throughput plant phenotyping and digital breeding. However, cotton seedling segmentation remains challenging due to fine-scale and complex organ morphology, uneven point density with noise, and the lack of high-quality annotated datasets. Methods: To address these issues, we propose DCSFormer, a tailored extension of Point Transformer V3 designed for cotton seedling point cloud segmentation. The model introduces the DCS Block, which leverages dynamic sparse expert routing and dual-channel attention to adaptively capture global semantic dependencies and subtle local geometric variations, thereby improving stem-leaf boundary discrimination. In addition, the proposed CLFSkip replaces traditional skip connections with a cross-layer fusion strategy, effectively integrating multi-scale features while preserving organ-level details. We also constructed an annotated cotton seedling dataset to support training and evaluation. Results and Discussion: Experimental results show that DCSFormer achieves 93.67% mIoU, 95.83% mPrec, 97.35% mRec, and 96.56% mF1, outperforming multiple comparison models. Furthermore, when evaluated against baseline models on two public datasets, Crops3D and Pheno4D, DCSFormer exceeds the baseline across all four metrics, further validating its effectiveness and generalizability. This work provides an effective solution for precise cotton seedling organ segmentation.

Code and data availability

The authors constructed an annotated cotton seedling point cloud dataset (100 samples with semantic/instance organ labels and ground-truth traits) used for training and evaluating DCSFormer, and the data availability statement points to a public Kaggle repository containing it. No author analysis code or trained model/