Leaf and Wood Separation for Individual Trees Using the Intensity and Density Data of Terrestrial Laser Scanners

Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) is a highly effective and noninvasive technology for retrieving the structural and biophysical attributes of trees using 3-D high-accuracy and high-density point clouds. The separation of leaf and wood points in TLS data is a prerequisite for the accurate and reliable derivation of these attributes. In this study, a new method is proposed to separate the leaf and wood points of individual trees by combining the TLS radiometric (intensity) and geometric (density) data. The leaf points are separated from the wood ones through three steps. First, the corrected intensity data are used to separate a part of the leaf points preliminarily given the differences in reflectance characteristics. Second, the density data are adopted for the further separation of another part of the leaf points because the density of the remaining leaf points is smaller than that of the wood points. Finally, a connectivity clustering algorithm is conducted to form several clusters with different sizes (points) and the remaining leaf points are separated in accordance with the cluster sizes. Eight different trees are selected to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The averaged overall accuracy and kappa coefficient of the eight trees are approximately 95% and 0.81, respectively. The results suggest that the combination of TLS intensity and density data can perform a superior separation of leaf and wood points in terms of efficiency and accuracy, and the proposed separation method can be accurately and robustly used for various trees with different species, sizes, and structures.