AdTree: Accurate, Detailed, and Automatic Modelling of Laser-Scanned Trees

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

69 Citations (Scopus)
134 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Laser scanning is an effective tool for acquiring geometric attributes of trees and vegetation, which lays a solid foundation for 3-dimensional tree modelling. Existing studies on tree modelling from laser scanning data are vast. However, some works cannot guarantee sufficient modelling accuracy, while some other works are mainly rule-based and therefore highly depend on user inputs. In this paper, we propose a novel method to accurately and automatically reconstruct detailed 3D tree models from laser scans. We first extract an initial tree skeleton from the input point cloud by establishing a minimum spanning tree using the Dijkstra shortest-path algorithm. Then, the initial tree skeleton is pruned by iteratively removing redundant components. After that, an optimization-based approach is performed to fit a sequence of cylinders to approximate the geometry of the tree branches. Experiments on various types of trees from different data sources demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method. The overall fitting error (i.e., the distance between the input points and the output model) is less than 10 cm. The reconstructed tree models can be further applied in the precise estimation of tree attributes, urban landscape visualization, etc. The source code of this work is freely available at https://github.com/tudelft3d/adtree
Original languageEnglish
Article number2074
Number of pages19
JournalRemote Sensing
Volume11
Issue number18
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019

Keywords

  • Laser scanning
  • Point cloud
  • Precision forestry
  • Tree modelling

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'AdTree: Accurate, Detailed, and Automatic Modelling of Laser-Scanned Trees'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this