Tree Skeleton Extraction From Laser Scanned Points

The tree skeleton is one of the important parameters for building 3D model of the tree. The accurate extraction of tree skeleton is of great significance for tree visualization. This paper proposed an effective method for extracting tree skeleton of individual trees. The complexity of canopy structure was reduced by slicing. The leaf and wood components were separated by combining classification and segmentation methods. L1-median algorithm was used to extract the tree skeleton points accurately. The results show that the method can accurately extract the tree skeleton from terrestrial LiDAR data. The extracted skeleton had a good conformance with the point cloud of the tree in morphology.