Jakob Geipel

Research Scientist

(+47) 915 66 289
jakob.geipel@nibio.no

Place
Apelsvoll

Visiting address
Nylinna 226, 2849 Kapp

Biography

Jakob is a research scientist working at the intersection of precision agriculture, remote sensing and digital agricultural technology. With a PhD in Agricultural Sciences and a background in geoinformatics and surveying engineering, he develops sensor- and data-driven approaches for more precise, efficient and knowledge-based crop production. 

His research integrates satellite, drone and ground-based observations with multispectral and hyperspectral analysis, radiometric calibration, agricultural modelling, machine learning and artificial intelligence. The work focuses on extracting reliable and actionable information about biomass, yield, crop quality and nutrient status, particularly in cereals, grassland and potato production. 

He leads the development of digital web services and scalable data-processing pipelines that translate research methods and geospatial data into practical tools for precision fertilization, crop monitoring and decision support. An important direction of his work is the integration of new sensor technologies, AI-based analytics and agricultural knowledge into robust digital services adapted to changing user needs and Norwegian agricultural conditions. 

Keywords

Precision agriculture; remote sensing; geoinformatics; multispectral and hyperspectral sensing; radiometric calibration; satellite and drone data; sensor systems; machine learning; artificial intelligence; agricultural modelling; crop monitoring; data pipelines; digital web services; decision support. 

Background

2012-2016: Dr. sc. agr. (Ph.D.) in Agricultural Sciences at the Institute of Crop Science, Department of Agronomy, University of Hohenheim, Germany

2009-2012: M.Sc. in Geoinformatics at the Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster, Germany

2005-2009: Dipl.-Ing. (FH) in Surveying Engineering and Geoinformatics at the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt, Germany

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Abstract

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have been widely adopted for reconstructing high-quality 3D scenes from 2D RGB images. However, achieving accurate 3D object segmentation within these reconstructed scenes remains challenging. Existing NeRF-based segmentation methods either rely on post-processing (SA3D), which produces noisy point clouds due to the absence of density field optimization, or employ joint training with additional segmentation heads (FruitNeRF), which can lead to suboptimal performance due to conflicting learning objectives. In this work, we propose InvNeRF-Seg (Input-substitution NeRF for Segmentation), a two-stage fine-tuning strategy for 3D object segmentation that preserves the original NeRF architecture and loss function entirely. We first train a standard NeRF on RGB images and then fine-tune it using 2D segmentation masks formatted as RGB-like inputs, without introducing any architectural modifications or additional loss functions. This input-substitution approach reshapes the density field to align with object regions while suppressing background density. We validate InvNeRF-Seg through comprehensive ablation studies examining the roles of density and color MLPs, loss function choices, and training strategies. Field density analysis reveals consistent semantic refinement: densities of object regions increase while background densities are suppressed. Experiments on synthetic fruit datasets and real-world soybean imagery demonstrate that InvNeRF-Seg produces cleaner 3D segmented point clouds compared to both SA3D and FruitNeRF, enabling more accurate downstream object counting. The method is further validated on a self-collected soybean dataset to demonstrate its applicability in real-world agricultural scenarios.