Benha University

Reda Fekry Abdlekawy KHALIEL

Lecturer

Faculty of Engineering, Shoubra Surveying Engineering

INDIVIDUAL TREE SEGMENTATION FROM BLS DATA BASED ON GRAPH AUTOENCODER

ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences • 2023
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Publication Information
Authors Reda Fekry; Wei Yao; A. Sani-Mohammed; Doha Amr
Keywords LiDAR; Individual Tree Segmentation; Backpack Laser Scanning; Graph Neural Network; Graph Autoencoder
Journal ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
Publisher ISPRS
Volume X-1/W1-2023
Issue Not Available
Pages 547–553
publication.type International
Paper Link Open Link
Supplementary Materials Not Available
Abstract
In the last two decades, Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) has been widely employed in forestry applications. Individual tree segmentation is essential to forest management because it is a prerequisite to tree reconstruction and biomass estimation. This paper introduces a general framework to extract individual trees from the LiDAR point cloud based on a graph link prediction problem. First, an undirected graph is generated from the point cloud based on K-nearest neighbors (KNN). Then, this graph is used to train a convolutional autoencoder that extracts the node embeddings to reconstruct the graph. Finally, the individual trees are defined by the separate sets of connected nodes of the reconstructed graph. A key advantage of the proposed method is that no further knowledge about tree or forest structure is required. Seven sample plots from a plantation forest with poplar and dawn redwood species have been employed in the experiments. Though the precision of the experimental results is up to 95 % for poplar species and 92 % for dawn redwood trees, the method still requires more investigations on natural forest types with mixed tree species.
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