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Smart-Tree: Neural Medial Axis Approximation of Point Clouds for 3D Tree Skeletonization

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Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (IbPRIA 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14062))

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Abstract

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 (https://github.com/uc-vision/synthetic-trees) and source code (https://github.com/uc-vision/smart-tree) are publicly available.

Supported by University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

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Acknowledgment

This work was funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment under contract C09X1923 (Catalyst: Strategic Fund).

This research/project is supported by the National Research Foundation, Singapore under its Industry Alignment Fund - Pre-positioning (IAF-PP) Funding Initiative. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of the National Research Foundation, Singapore.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UC Vision Research Lab, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, 8041, New Zealand

    Harry Dobbs, Oliver Batchelor, Richard Green & James Atlas

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  1. Harry Dobbs
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  2. Oliver Batchelor
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  4. James Atlas
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Correspondence to Harry Dobbs .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain

    Antonio Pertusa

  2. University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain

    Antonio Javier Gallego

  3. Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

    Joan Andreu Sánchez

  4. IPO Porto, Coimbra, Portugal

    Inês Domingues

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Dobbs, H., Batchelor, O., Green, R., Atlas, J. (2023). Smart-Tree: Neural Medial Axis Approximation of Point Clouds for 3D Tree Skeletonization. In: Pertusa, A., Gallego, A.J., Sánchez, J.A., Domingues, I. (eds) Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis. IbPRIA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14062. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36616-1_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36616-1_28

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-36616-1

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