A hybrid framework for single tree detection from airborne laser scanning data: A case study in temperate mature coniferous forests in Ontario, Canada

This study presents a hybrid framework for single tree detection from airborne laser scanning (ALS) data by integrating low-level image processing techniques into a high-level probabilistic framework. The proposed approach modeled tree crowns in a forest plot as a configuration of circular objects. We took advantage of low-level image processing techniques to generate candidate configurations from the canopy height model (CHM): the treetop positions were sampled within the over-extracted local maxima via local maxima filtering, and the crown sizes were derived from marker-controlled watershed segmentation using corresponding treetops as markers. The configuration containing the best possible set of detected tree objects was estimated by a global optimization solver. To achieve this, we introduced a Gibbs energy, which contains a data term that judges the fitness of the objects with respect to the data, and a prior term that prevents severe overlapping between tree crowns on the configuration space. The energy was then embedded into a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) dynamics coupled with a simulated annealing to find its global minimum. In this research, we also proposed a Monte Carlo-based sampling method for parameter estimation. We tested the method on a temperate mature coniferous forest in Ontario, Canada and also on simulated coniferous forest plots with different degrees of crown overlap. The experimental results showed the effectiveness of our proposed method, which was capable of reducing the commission errors produced by local maxima filtering, thus increasing the overall detection accuracy by approximately 10% on all of the datasets.