Tree Annotations in LiDAR Data Using Point Densities and Convolutional Neural Networks

LiDAR provides highly accurate 3-D point clouds. However, data need to be manually labeled in order to provide subsequent useful information. Manual annotation of such data is time-consuming, tedious, and error prone, and hence, in this article, we present three automatic methods for annotating trees in LiDAR data. The first method requires high-density point clouds and uses certain LiDAR data attributes for the purpose of tree identification, achieving almost 90% accuracy. The second method uses a voxel-based 3-D convolutional neural network on low-density LiDAR data sets and is able to identify most large trees accurately but struggles with smaller ones due to the voxelization process. The third method is a scaled version of the PointNet++ method and works directly on outdoor point clouds and achieves an $F_{\mathrm{ score}}$ of 82.1% on the ISPRS benchmark data set, comparable to the state-of-the-art methods but with increased efficiency.