Static terrestrial laser scanning of juvenile understory trees for field phenotyping

This study was to attempt the cutting-edge 3D remote sensing technique of static terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) for parametric 3D reconstruction of juvenile understory trees. The data for test was collected with a Leica HDS6100 TLS system in a single-scan way. The geometrical structures of juvenile understory trees are extracted by model fitting. Cones are used to model trunks and branches. Principal component analysis (PCA) is adopted to calculate their major axes. Coordinate transformation and orthogonal projection are used to estimate the parameters of the cones. Then, AutoCAD is utilized to simulate the morphological characteristics of the understory trees, and to add secondary branches and leaves in a random way. Comparison of the reference values and the estimated values gives the regression equation and shows that the proposed algorithm of extracting parameters is credible. The results have basically verified the applicability of TLS for field phenotyping of juvenile understory trees.