Abstract
As an important component of urban vegetation, street trees play an important role in maintenance of environmental quality, aesthetic beauty of urban landscape, and social service for inhabitants. Acquiring accurate and up-to-date inventory information for street trees is required for urban horticultural planning, and municipal urban forest management. This paper presents a new Voxel-based Marked Neighborhood Searching (VMNS) method for efficiently identifying street trees and deriving their morphological parameters from Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) point cloud data. The VMNS method consists of six technical components: voxelization, calculating values of voxels, searching and marking neighborhoods, extracting potential trees, deriving morphological parameters, and eliminating pole-like objects other than trees. The method is validated and evaluated through two case studies. The evaluation results show that the completeness and correctness of our method for street tree detection are over 98%. The derived morphological parameters, including tree height, crown diameter, diameter at breast height (DBH), and crown base height (CBH), are in a good agreement with the field measurements. Our method provides an effective tool for extracting various morphological parameters for individual street trees from MLS point cloud data.
Highlights
IntroductionStreet trees play an important role in enhancing environmental quality, maintaining aesthetic beauty of urban landscape, and providing social service for inhabitants
Urban vegetation is an important component of urban ecosystem and landscape
By using our Voxel-based Marked Neighborhood Searching (VMNS) method, 121 pole-like objects are detected as potential street trees, and 49 non-tree pole-like objects are eliminated based on the threshold values
Summary
Street trees play an important role in enhancing environmental quality, maintaining aesthetic beauty of urban landscape, and providing social service for inhabitants. Street trees provide shade for pedestrians, benefit storm-water management [1], reduce air pollutants [2,3,4] and street noise [5], moderate heat accumulation in urban street canyons [6,7,8], and decrease building energy consumption and CO2 emissions [9]. The growth conditions of street trees are often negatively influenced by some natural and abiotic factors [10]. Some studies show that about half of newly transplanted street trees cannot survive beyond the first two years in some cities [11,12]. Acquiring and monitoring the conditions of street trees is important for urban tree planting, maintenance, and management
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