The automatic tree detection and delineation from Airborne LiDAR

The individual tree information is the most important parameter of biomass inversion. Recently, LiDAR has been widely and successfully applied in forest research, and it shows promise to map individual trees in complex and heterogeneous forests. Based on Airborne LiDAR point cloud, this paper uses local maximum filtering technique to extract the height and crown of individual tree of Qinghai spruce forest in Qilian Mountains. The analysis shows that accuracy of the three methods is depended on the Thresholds. All of them only detect less than 50% trees in the study area. There are two reasons. The first is the density of the point clouds is only 6 dot/m2. The second is some trees are understory and the height is too small, even less than the error range of CHM.