Trees Detection From Laser Point Clouds Acquired in Dense Urban Areas by a Mobile Mapping System

Abstract. 3D reconstruction of trees is of great interest in large-scale 3D city modelling. Laser scanners provide geometrically accurate 3D point clouds that are very useful for object recognition in complex urban scenes. Trees often cause important occlusions on building façades. Their recognition can lead to occlusion maps that are useful for many façade oriented applications such as visual based localisation and automatic image tagging. This paper proposes a pipeline to detect trees in point clouds acquired in dense urban areas with only laser informations (x,y, z coordinates and intensity). It is based on local geometric descriptors computed on each laser point using a determined neighbourhood. These descriptors describe the local shape of objects around every 3D laser point. A projection of these values on a 2D horizontal accumulation space followed by a combination of morphological filters provides individual tree clusters. The pipeline is evaluated and the results are presented on a set of one million laser points using a man made ground truth.