A novel method for extracting skeleton of fruit treefrom 3D point clouds

Tree skeleton could be useful to agronomy researchers because the skeleton describes the shape and topological structure of a tree.The phenomenon of organs’mutual occlusion in fruit tree canopy is usually very serious,this should result in a large amount of data missing in directed laser scanning 3D point clouds from a fruit tree.However,traditional approaches can be ineffective and problematic in extracting the tree skeleton correctly when the tree point clouds contain occlusions and missing points.To overcome this limitation,we present a method for accurate and fast extracting the skeleton of fruit tree from laser scanner measured 3D point clouds.The proposed method selects the start point and endpoint of a branch from the point clouds by user’s manual interaction,then a backward searching is used to find a path from the 3D point cloud with a radius parameter as a restriction.The experimental results in several kinds of fruit trees demonstrate that our method can extract the skeleton of a leafy fruit tree with highly accuracy.