VO-LVV—A Novel Urban Regional Living Vegetation Volume Quantitative Estimation Model Based on the Voxel Measurement Method and an Octree Data Structure

Abstract

Currently, three-dimensional (3D) point clouds are widely used in the field of remote sensing and mapping, including the measurement of living vegetation volume (LVV) in cities. However, the existing quantitative methods for LVV measurement are mainly based on single tree modeling or on the calculation of single tree species’ growth parameters, which cannot be applied to the many tree species and complex forest layer structures present in urban regions, and thus are unsuitable for broad application. LVV measurement is based primarily on vegetation point cloud data, which can be obtained through many methods and often lack some information, thus posing problems in the use of traditional LVV measurement methods. To address the above problems, this paper proposes a novel LVV estimation model, which combines the voxel measurement method with an organizing point cloud based on an octree structure (we called it VO-LVV), to estimate the LVV of typical vegetation and landforms in cities. The point cloud data of single plants and multiple plants were obtained through preprocessing to verify the improvement in the calculation efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method. The results indicated that the VO-LVV estimation method, compared with the traditional method, enabled substantial efficiency improvement and higher calculation accuracy. Furthermore, the new method can be simultaneously applied to scenarios of single plants and multiple plants, and can be used for the calculation of LVV in areas with various vegetation types in cities.