3D-CNN BASED TREE SPECIES CLASSIFICATION USING MOBILE LIDAR DATA

Abstract. Our work addresses the problem of classifying tree species from mobile LiDAR data. The work is a two step-wise strategy, including tree segmentation and tree species classification. In the tree segmentation step, a voxel-based upward growing filtering is proposed to remove terrain points from the mobile laser scanning data. Then, individual trees are segmented via a Euclidean distance clustering approach and Voxel-based Normalized Cut (VNCut) segmentation approach. In the tree species classification, a voxel-based 3D convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) model is developed based on intensity information. A road section data acquired by a RIEGL VMX-450 system are selected for evaluating the proposed tree classification method. Qualitative analysis shows that our algorithm achieves a good performance.