2023/03/21 by Dobbs, Harry, Batchelor, Oliver, Green, Richard +1 · 2 citations
#Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2303.11560
This paper introduces Smart-Tree, a supervised method for approximating the medial axes of branch skeletons from a tree point cloud. Smart-Tree uses a sparse voxel convolutional neural network to extract the radius and direction towards the medial axis of each input point. A greedy algorithm performs robust skeletonization using the estimated medial axis. Our proposed method provides robustness to complex tree structures and improves fidelity when dealing with self-occlusions, complex geometry, touching branches, and varying point densities. We evaluate Smart-Tree using a multi-species synthetic tree dataset and perform qualitative analysis on a real-world tree point cloud. Our experimentation with synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrates the robustness of our approach over the current state-of-the-art method. The dataset and source code are publicly available.