Mushroom Segmentation and 3D Pose Estimation from Point Clouds using
  Fully Convolutional Geometric Features and Implicit Pose Encoding
George Retsinas Niki Efthymiou Petros Maragos
Modern agricultural applications rely more and more on deep learning
solutions. However, training well-performing deep networks requires a large
amount of annotated data that may not be available and in the case of 3D
annotation may not even be feasible for human annotators. In this work, we
develop a deep learning approach to segment mushrooms and estimate their pose
on 3D data, in the form of point clouds acquired by depth sensors. To
circumvent the annotation problem, we create a synthetic dataset of mushroom
scenes, where we are fully aware of 3D information, such as the pose of each
mushroom. The proposed network has a fully convolutional backbone, that parses
sparse 3D data, and predicts pose information that implicitly defines both
instance segmentation and pose estimation task. We have validated the
effectiveness of the proposed implicit-based approach for a synthetic test set,
as well as provided qualitative results for a small set of real acquired point
clouds with depth sensors. Code is publicly available at
https://github.com/georgeretsi/mushroom-pose.