Point Cloud Completion of Occluded Corn with a 3D Positional Gated Multilayer Perceptron and Prior Shape Encoder

To obtain the complete shape and pose of corn under occlusion, this study proposes a point cloud completion algorithm for completing the fragmented corn point cloud after segmentation. Considering that this work focuses on a single-class crop—corn—the proposals mainly focus on the deep learning model size and the completion of the overall shape of the corn. In this work, the 3D corn models derived from segmentation are employed to systematically output the fragmented point cloud data in batches. The Shape Coding PointAttN (SCPAN) algorithm is also proposed, which is based on PointAttN. The model’s structure is simplified to output sparse point clouds and minimize computational complexity, and a gated multilayer perceptron (MLP) containing 3D position coding is introduced to enhance the model’s spatial awareness. In addition, the prior shape encoder module is initially trained and subsequently integrated into the model to enhance its focus on shape characteristics. Compared to the original model, PointAttN, SCPAN achieves a 34.2% reduction in the number of parameters, and the inference time is reduced by 30 ms while maintaining comparable accuracy. The experimental results show that the proposed method can complete the corn point cloud more effectively, using a small model to help estimate the pose and dimensions of corn accurately. This work supports the precise phenotypic analysis of corn and similar crops, such as citrus and tomatoes, and promotes the development of smart agricultural technology.