Detection, segmentation and localization of individual trees from MMS point cloud data

In this paper, we address the extraction of objects from 3D point clouds acquired with mobile mapping systems. More specifically, we focus on the detection of tree-like objects, a subsequent segmentation of individual trees and a localization of the respective trees. Thereby, the detection of tree-like objects is achieved via a binary point-wise classification based on geometric features, which categorizes each point of the 3D point cloud into either tree-like objects or non-tree-like objects. The subsequent segmentation and localization of individual trees is carried out by applying a 2D projection and a mean shift segmentation on a downsampled version of that part of the original 3D point cloud which represents all tree-like objects, and it also involves a segment-based shape analysis to only retain plausible tree segments. We demonstrate the performance of our framework on a benchmark dataset which contains 10.13M 3D points and has been acquired with a mobile mapping system in the city of Delft in the Netherlands.