Quantifying robustness: 3D tree point cloud skeletonization with smart-tree in noisy domains

Abstract

Extracting tree skeletons from 3D tree point clouds is challenged by noise and incomplete data. While our prior work (Dobbs et al., in: Iberian conference on pattern recognition and image analysis, Springer, Berlin, pp. 351–362, 2023) introduced a deep learning approach for approximating tree branch medial axes, its robustness against various types of noise has not been thoroughly evaluated. This paper addresses this gap. Specifically, we simulate real-world noise challenges by introducing 3D Perlin noise (to represent subtractive noise) and Gaussian noise (to mimic additive noise). To facilitate this evaluation, we introduce a new synthetic tree point cloud dataset, available at https://github.com/uc-vision/synthetic-trees-II. Our results indicate that our deep learning-based skeletonization method is tolerant to both additive and subtractive noise.