Sector-Based Perimeter Reconstruction for Tree Diameter Estimation Using 3D LiDAR Point Clouds

Abstract

Accurate estimation of tree diameter at breast height (DBH) from LiDAR point clouds is essential for forest inventory, biomass assessment, and ecological monitoring. This paper presents a perimeter-based DBH estimation framework that achieves competitive accuracy against geometric fitting methods across three datasets. The proposed approach partitions the trunk cross-section into angular sectors and employs Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) to identify representative boundary points in each sector, weighted by radial proximity and statistical confidence. To handle occlusion and partial scans, missing sectors are reconstructed using symmetry-aware proxy generation. The final perimeter is modeled via either convex hull or B-spline interpolation, from which DBH is derived. Extensive experiments were conducted on two public TreeScope datasets and a custom mobile LiDAR dataset. Compared to the Density-Based Clustering Ring Extraction (DBCRE) baseline, our method reduced RMSE by 22.7% on UCM-0523M (from 2.60 to 2.01 cm), 34.3% on VAT-0723M (from 3.50 to 2.30 cm), and 29.6% on the Custom Dataset (from 2.16 to 1.52 cm). Ablation studies confirmed the individual and synergistic contributions of GMM clustering, radial consistency filtering, and proxy synthesis. Overall, the method provides a flexible alternative that reduces dependence on strict geometric assumptions, offering improved DBH estimation performance with moderate occlusion and incomplete, uneven boundary coverage.

Plant phenotyping relevance

3D LiDAR点群から樹木DBHという明示的な植物形態形質を推定する手法を開発し、複数データセットとベースライン比較・アブレーションで検証しており、フェノタイピング手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper uses public TreeScope subsets (UCM-0523M, VAT-0723M) and a custom MLS dataset, but TreeScope is cited prior work and the custom dataset has no stated public deposit or availability URL. No author analysis code, scripts, models, or supplementary data with explicit availability language appear in the supplied.

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