Tree species classification based on 3D bark texture analysis

Abstract

Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) technique is today widely used in ground plots to acquire 3D point clouds from which forest inventory attributes are calculated. In the case of mixed plantings where the 3D point clouds contain data from several different tree species, it is important to be able to automatically recognize the tree species in order to analyze the data of each of the species separately. Although automatic tree species recognition from TLS data is an important problem, it has received very little attention from the scientific community. In this paper we propose a method for classifying five different tree species using TLS data. Our method is based on the analysis of the 3D geometric texture of the bark in order to compute roughness measures and shape characteristics that are fed as input to a Random Forest classifier to classify the tree species. The method has been evaluated on a test set composed of 265 samples (53 samples of each of the 5 species) and the results obtained are very encouraging. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.