Soft Segmentation of Terrestrial Laser Scanning Point Cloud of Forests

Abstract

As the three-dimensional (3D) laser scanner is widely used for forest inventory, analyzing and processing point cloud data captured with a 3D laser scanner have become an important research topic in recent years. The extraction of single trees from point cloud data is essential for further investigation at the individual tree level, such as counting trees and trunk analysis, and many developments related to this topic have been published. However, constructing an accurate and automated method to obtain the tree crown silhouette from the point cloud data is challenging because the tree crowns often overlap between adjacent trees. A soft segmentation method that uses K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and contour shape constraints at the overlap region is proposed to solve this task. Experimental results show that the visual effect of the tree crown shape and the precision of point cloud segmentation have improved. It is concluded that the proposed method works well for tree crown segmentation and silhouette reconstruction from the terrestrial laser scanning point cloud data of the forest.