Tree crown delineation from high resolution airborne LiDAR based on densities of high points

Tree detection and tree crown delineation from Airborne LiDAR has been focusing mostly on utilizing the canopy height model (CHM). This paper presents a method for individual tree crown delineation based on densities of high points (DHP) from the high resolution Airborne LiDAR. The DHP method relies on the fact that the density of received laser pulses above a certain height is high at the centre of a tree crown and decreases towards the edge of the crown. In this study, the performance of this method is compared to the CHM approach. The results demonstrate that tree delineation based on DHP is at least comparable to the CHM approach. The DHP based approach performs better compared to the CHM especially for trees with almost flat-top crown shape. However, post-processing on tree crown segments is still necessary to improve the overall accuracy of tree detection and tree crown delineation.