3D reconstruction of a single tree from terrestrial LiDAR data

Terrestrial LiDAR systems have received lots of attention on three-dimensional (3D) structure reconstruction for trees, especially on the branches skeleton generation. On this basis, a method is proposed to add leaves structures based on point density by dividing small cube in the canopy to reduce the influence of uneven distribution of point cloud, combining gap fraction model to retrieve leaf area of a tree using terrestrial LiDAR data. It is successfully applied to reconstruct 3D trees using points data simulated by ray tracing algorithm as well as field measured points data. The relative error of leaf area between reconstructed and real structure is less than 0.9%. Meanwhile, the most relative error of directional gap fraction is also less than 4.1%. The experimental results prove that the method has gotten a satisfied consistency on visual sense and quantitative evaluation between the 3D structure reconstructed and real structure.