ALGORITHM FOR THE AUTOMATIC ESTIMATION OF AGRICULTURAL TREE GEOMETRIC PARAMETERS USING AIRBORNE LASER SCANNING DATA

The estimation of dendrometric parameters has become an important issue for the agricultural planning and management. Since the classical field measurements are time consuming and inefficient, Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data can be used for this purpose. Point clouds acquired for orchard areas allow to determine orchard structures and geometric parameters of individual trees. In this research we propose an automatic method that allows to determine geometric parameters of individual olive trees using ALS data. The method is based on the α-shape algorithm applied for normalized point clouds. The algorithm returns polygons representing crown shapes. For points located inside each polygon, we select the maximum height and the minimum height and then we estimate the tree height and the crown base height. We use the first two components of the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) as the estimators for crown diameters. The α-shape algorithm requires to define the radius parameter <i>R</i>. In this study we investigated how sensitive are the results to the radius size, by comparing the results obtained with various settings of the R with reference values of estimated parameters from field measurements. Our study area was the olive orchard located in the Castellon Province, Spain. We used a set of ALS data with an average density of 4 points&thinsp;m<sip>&minus;2</sup>. We noticed, that there was a narrow range of the <i>R</i> parameter, from 0.48&thinsp;m to 0.80&thinsp;m, for which all trees were detected and for which we obtained a high correlation coefficient (>&thinsp;0.9) between estimated and measured values. We compared our estimates with field measurements. The RMSE of differences was 0.8&thinsp;m for the tree height, 0.5&thinsp;m for the crown base height, 0.6&thinsp;m and 0.4&thinsp;m for the longest and shorter crown diameter, respectively. The accuracy obtained with the method is thus sufficient for agricultural applications