INDIVIDUAL TREE SEGMENTATION FROM BLS DATA BASED ON GRAPH AUTOENCODER

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.