Delineation of Individual Tree Crowns for Mobile Laser Scanning Data

The information of individual trees plays an important role in urban surveying and mapping. With the development of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology, 3-Dimenisonal (3D) structure of trees can be generated in point clouds with high spatial resolution and accuracy. Individual tree segmentations are used to derive tree structural attributes such as tree height, crown diameter, stem position etc. In this study, a framework is proposed to take advantage of the detailed structures of tree crowns which are represented in the mobile laser scanning (MLS) data. This framework consists of five steps: (1) Automatically detect and remove ground points using RANSAC; (2) Compress all the above ground points to image grid with 3D knowledge reserved; (3) Simplify and remove unqualified grids; (4) Find tree peaks using a heuristic searching method; (5) Delineate the individual tree crowns by applying a modified watershed method. In an experiment on the point clouds on Xiamen Island, China, individual tree crowns from MLS point cloud data are successfully extracted.