Real-time detection of street tree crowns using mobile laser scanning based on pointwise classification

Abstract

For targeted spraying in urban streets using mobile laser scanning (MLS), it is crucial to continuously detect tree crowns in real time from MLS data collected online. Crown detection based on a pointwise classification method, which predicts whether a point belongs to a crown using a binary classifier composed of a set of local features extracted from the neighbourhood of the point, is suitable for online data processing. However, the computational complexity of pointwise detection methods needs to be reduced to meet the real-time requirements of online targeted spraying. This paper proposes a real-time detection method for street tree crowns using MLS based on pointwise classification. A cubic neighbourhood is adopted from which a set of statistical features are extracted. A coarse-to-fine neighbourhood search method based on an MLS data grid storage structure is proposed to quickly query the neighbours. The classification performance and computational time of single features are evaluated. Then, the features are ranked using the technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS). Finally, a subset of features that are easy to calculate and have high discrimination are selected and fused into a crown detector using a random forest algorithm. During online detection, the point cloud is sampled in terms of the vehicle movement and LiDAR measurement before being detected. An MLS point cloud collected from a 451 m urban street is used in the experiments. When the neighbourhood size is set to 0.3 m, the detection time per scanline is 24.84 ms on the unsampled test set with an F1 score of 0.9927. When the test set is sampled with a total sampling rate of 40, the detection time is reduced to 1% with an F1 score of 0.9906. The experimental results show that the proposed method can provide real-time and accurate detection of street tree crowns for online targeted spraying.