An Automatic Tree Skeleton Extraction Approach Based on Multi-View Slicing Using Terrestrial LiDAR Scans Data

Effective 3D tree reconstruction based on point clouds from terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) scans (TLS) has been widely recognized as a critical technology in forestry and ecology modeling. The major advantages of using TLS lie in its rapidly and automatically capturing tree information at millimeter level, providing massive high-density data. In addition, TLS 3D tree reconstruction allows for occlusions and complex structures from the derived point cloud of trees to be obtained. In this paper, an automatic tree skeleton extraction approach based on multi-view slicing is proposed to improve the TLS 3D tree reconstruction, which borrowed the idea from the medical imaging technology of X-ray computed tomography. Firstly, we extracted the precise trunk center and then cut the point cloud of the tree into slices. Next, the skeleton from each slice was generated using the kernel mean shift and principal component analysis algorithms. Accordingly, these isolated skeletons were smoothed and morphologically synthetized. Finally, the validation in point clouds of two trees acquired from multi-view TLS further demonstrated the potential of the proposed framework in efficiently dealing with TLS point cloud data.