Automatic segmentation

Automatic segmentation of a point cloud presenting a single tree captured by terrestrial laser scanning. The approach uses the neighbor relation of the surface patches whose center points are presented as spheres in this animation. The process starts from the tree base and advances until all surface patches are processed.

At every step, a cut set is defined for the current segment. The cut set is basically a layer of surface patches that are either appended to the current segment or marked as a base of a new segment. Whenever the cut set becomes disconnected, each of its components is inspected in various ways to determine whether it belongs to the current segment or not. A component that is not part of the segment is marked as a new base. A segment is completed when it cannot be extended into any unprocessed direction. Upon completion a new base is selected from the process queue.

For details of the segmentation process, see the group homepage or, e.g., the open access journal article "Fast Automatic Precision Tree Models from Terrestrial Laser Scanner Data" (http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/5/2/491).

This animation was produced by the Inverse Problems research group in the Department of Mathematics at Tampere University of Technology (http://math.tut.fi/inversegroup).

Animation created using Blender (http://www.blender.org).

Music:
Firebrand Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Sound effects:
Whooshes - 27 - Wooshes - Dark Rumbling Low.wav
Whooshes - 30 - Wooshes - Crackling Energy.wav
by koroshiya1 at http://www.freesound.org/
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/