: A scene of five trees automatically reconstructed by our algorithm. The images show a photo of the scene, point cloud, reconstructed trees, and textured models with leaves. The insets show the ability of our method to handle overlapping crowns and missing data. Trees, bushes, and other plants are ubiquitous in urban environments, and realistic models of trees can add a great deal of realism to a digital urban scene. There has been much research on modeling tree structures, but limited work on reconstructing the geometry of real-world trees -even then, most works have focused on reconstruction from photographs aided by significant user interaction. In this paper, we perform active laser scanning of real-world vegetation and present an automatic approach that robustly reconstructs skeletal structures of trees, from which full geometry can be generated. The core of our method is a series of global optimizations that fit skeletal structures to the often sparse, incomplete, and noisy point data. A significant benefit of our approach is its ability to reconstruct multiple overlapping trees simultaneously without segmentation. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach on many raw scans of different tree varieties.
REF use global optimizations for automatically reconstructing the branching structure of multiple overlapping trees.
Automatic reconstruction of tree skeletal structures from point clouds
SIGGRAPH ASIA '10
Computer Science