Study of morphological crown control in LiDAR-derived canopy height model

Canopy height model (CHM) is an important model of LiDAR application in forestry. The quality of CHM directly or indirectly influences the subsequent forest parameters extraction and estimation. However, some abnormal changes of elevation exist in CHM regularly. This study tried to get crown area in CHM ignoring the negative influence from these changes using morphological crown control. The morphological crown control determined crown areas by a morphological closing operator with two thresholds. The results showed that our method could give the crown areas well. The thresholds´ setting was discussed and they were mainly decided by the crown base height of the tree in object area and the CHM´s resolution.