Segmenting tree crowns from terrestrial and mobile LiDAR data by exploring ecological theories

Abstract The rapid development of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) techniques is advancing ecological and forest research. During the last decade, numerous single tree segmentation techniques have been developed using airborne LiDAR data. However, accurate crown segmentation using terrestrial or mobile LiDAR data, which is an essential prerequisite for extracting branch level forest characteristics, is still challenging mainly because of the difficulties posed by tree crown intersection and irregular crown shape. In the current work, we developed a comparative shortest-path algorithm (CSP) for segmenting tree crowns scanned using terrestrial (T)-LiDAR and mobile LiDAR. The algorithm consists of two steps, namely trunk detection and subsequent crown segmentation, with the latter inspired by the well-proved metabolic ecology theory and the ecological fact that vascular plants tend to minimize the transferring distance to the root. We tested the algorithm on mobile-LiDAR-scanned roadside trees and T-LiDAR-scanned broadleaved and coniferous forests in China. Point-level quantitative assessments of the segmentation results showed that for mobile-LiDAR-scanned roadside trees, all the points were classified to their corresponding trees correctly, and for T-LiDAR-scanned broadleaved and coniferous forests, kappa coefficients ranging from 0.83 to 0.93 were obtained. We believe that our algorithm will make a contribution to solving the problem of crown segmentation in T-LiDAR scanned-forests, and might be of interest to researchers in LiDAR data processing and to forest ecologists. In addition, our research highlights the advantages of using ecological theories as guidelines for processing LiDAR data.