Automated individual tree crown delineation from LIDAR data using morphological techniques

35th International Symposium on Remote Sensing of Environment

地球科学;生态环境科学

Jing, L.^1 ; Hu, B.^2 ; Li, H.^1 ; Li, J.^2 ; Noland, T.^3

Center for Earth Observation and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China^1

Department of Earth and Space Science and Engineering, York University, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada^2

Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Ontario Forest Research Institute, 1235 Queen St. West, Sault Ste. Marie, ON P6A 2E5, Canada^3

关键词: Closed canopies;    Deciduous trees;    Geometric shape;    Horizontal slices;    Individual tree crown;    Multiscale method;    Ontario , Canada;    Tree crown delineation;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/17/1/012152/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1755-1315/17/1/012152

学科分类：环境科学（综合）

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

In current tree crown delineation from LiDAR data, treetops and 3D geometric shapes of tree crowns are frequently extracted from LiDAR-derived Crown Height Model (CHM) and used as references to localize and delineate crowns. However, it is difficult to detect deciduous treetops and delineate deciduous tree crowns. The 3D shape of a crown, which can be derived from CHM, may be taken as a half ellipsoid, and any horizontal slice of the ellipsoid contains the treetop and indicates not only the location but also the spatial extent of the crown. Based on such slices, a novel multi-scale method for individual tree crown delineation from CHM was proposed in this study. This method consists mainly of two steps: (1) morphologically open the CHM over the scale range of target tree crowns; and (2) take local maxima within each resulting opened CHM as the horizontal slices of target crowns at the corresponding scale level and integrate all the slices within the scale range together to represent the spatial distribution of target crowns. In an experiment on CHMs over two natural closed canopy forests in Ontario, Canada, the proposed method accurately delineated the majority of the tree crowns from closed canopy forests.