AUTOMATIC MODELLING OF 3D TREES USING AERIAL LIDAR POINT CLOUD DATA AND DEEP LEARNING

Abstract. 3D tree objects can be used in various applications, like estimation of physiological equivalent temperature (PET). During this project, a method is designed to extract 3D tree objects from a country-wide point cloud. To apply this method on large scale, the algorithm needs to be efficient. Extraction of trees is done in two steps: point-wise classification using the PointNet deep learning network, and Watershed segmentation to split points into individual trees. After that, 3D tree models are made. The method is evaluated on 3 areas, a park, city center and housing block in the city of Deventer, the Netherlands. This resulted into an average accuracy of 92% and a F1-score of 0.96.