Automated detection of branch dimensions in woody skeletons of leafless fruit tree canopies

Automated detection of branch dimensions in woody skeletons of leafless fruit tree canopies

Bucksch, A.
Fleck, S.

Aerospace Engineering

DEOS

2009-10-14

Light driven physiological processes of tree canopies need to be modelled based on detailed 3Dcanopy structure – we explore the possibilities offered by terrestrial LIDAR to automatically represent woody skeletons of leafless trees as a basis for adequate models of canopy structure. The automatic evaluation method for LIDAR data of fruit trees is based on a previously developed skeletonization algorithm. Branch length was chosen as example parameter to test the performance of the algorithm with manually measured data. The extraction of the brach length utilizes a graph splitting procedure to extract the individual branches from the skeleton. The algorithm is validated against six leafless apple trees and one cherry tree with small blossoms. The validation against a manually measured ground truth resulted in a good correlation up to 0.81.

terrestrial laser scanning
canopy analysis
point cloud
skeleton

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:73327db7-40b7-4a47-9dec-a12d69098b7e

SilviLaser 2009 proceedings, 14.-16. October 2009 Austin,Texas

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2009 Bucksch, A. Fleck, S.