Shaojun Hu, Zhengrong Li, Zhiyi Zhang, Dongijan He, Michael Wimmer
Efficient Tree Modeling from Airborne LiDAR Point Clouds
Computers & Graphics, 67:1-13, October 2017. [draft]
@article{HU-2017-ETM, title = "Efficient Tree Modeling from Airborne LiDAR Point Clouds", author = "Shaojun Hu and Zhengrong Li and Zhiyi Zhang and Dongijan He and Michael Wimmer", year = "2017", abstract = "Modeling real-world trees is important in many application areas, including computer graphics, botany and forestry. An example of a modeling method is reconstruction from light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scans. In contrast to terrestrial LiDAR systems, airborne LiDAR systems – even current high-resolution systems – capture only very few samples on tree branches, which makes the reconstruction of trees from airborne LiDAR a challenging task. In this paper, we present a new method to model plausible trees with fine details from airborne LiDAR point clouds. To reconstruct tree models, first, we use a normalized cut method to segment an individual tree point cloud. Then, trunk points are added to supplement the incomplete point cloud, and a connected graph is constructed by searching sufficient nearest neighbors for each point. Based on the observation of real-world trees, a direction field is created to restrict branch directions. Then, branch skeletons are constructed using a bottom-up greedy algorithm with a priority queue, and leaves are arranged according to phyllotaxis. We demonstrate our method on a variety of examples and show that it can generate a plausible tree model in less than one second, in addition to preserving features of the original point cloud.", month = oct, issn = "0097-8493", journal = "Computers & Graphics", volume = "67", pages = "1--13", keywords = "tree modeling, LIDAR, point clouds", URL = "https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2017/HU-2017-ETM/", }
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