SPROUT: A Scalable Diffusion Foundation Model for Agricultural Vision

Image-based plant phenotyping depends on dense structural understanding of crops, yet pixel-level annotation remains expensive across species, organs, growth stages, and field conditions. General-purpose vision foundation models offer a natural route to label efficiency, but their web-scale pretraining objectives transfer weakly to agricultural imagery, where semantics are often determined by fine organ geometry inside repetitive, texture-dominated scenes. We introduce SPROUT, a diffusion foundation model for multi-crop plant phenotyping. SPROUT learns from 2.6~million unlabeled open-field images using a VAE-free pixel-space Diffusion Transformer, and selects transferable features with a label-free effective-rank criterion over denoising timesteps. This design shifts pretraining from crop-based invariance to structure-preserving denoising, making the representation better aligned with dense phenotyping tasks. We evaluate SPROUT across dense phenotyping tasks, including organ segmentation, crop-weed parsing, depth estimation, and counting. SPROUT consistently improves over strong web-pretrained baselines, with the largest gains on dense structural prediction, and shows favorable label and compute efficiency compared with general-purpose and crop-specific foundation models.