Automated street tree inventory using mobile LiDAR point clouds based on Hough transform and active contours

Trees are important road-side objects, and their geometric information plays an essential role in road studies and safety analyses. This paper proposes an efficient method for the automated creation of a road-side tree inventory using Mobile Terrestrial Lidar System (MTLS) point clouds. In the proposed method ground points are filtered through preprocessing to reduce processing time. Next, tree trunks are detected by performing a Hough Transform (HT) algorithm on several generated raster images from the point clouds. By initiating an approximate area of a tree’s foliage through a Voronoi Tessellation (VT) algorithm, the accurate boundary of the foliage is identified by applying Active Contour (AC) models. By extracting the points within this foliage boundary the geometric characteristics of each tree are obtained. This method was evaluated with two sample point clouds from different MTLS systems, and the algorithm correctly extracted all of the trees from both datasets. Additionally, comparing the calculated parameters with manually observed measures, the accuracy of the obtained geometric parameters were promising.