USING MOBILE LASER SCANNING POINT CLOUDS TO EXTRACT URBAN ROADSIDE TREES FOR ECOLOGICAL BENEFITS ESTIMATION

Abstract. Roadside trees in the city play a crucial role in addressing the issues of air pollution, urban heat island effects, road noise, and so on. This paper proposes an efficient and robust method to automatically extract individual roadside trees with morphological parameters from mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds for ecological benefits estimation. The proposed method consists of four steps: MLS data pre-processing, pole-like objects classification, individual tree extraction, morphological parameters calculation for ecological benefits estimation. The proposed method is verified using three complex datasets in Shanghai, China. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves good performance in extracting individual tree in terms of average precision and recall (91.83%, 92.60%), and provides detailed information for ecological benefits estimation.