Automatic Tree Annotation in LiDAR Data

LiDAR provides highly accurate 3D point cloud data for a number of tasks such as forest surveying and urban planning. Automatic classification of this data, however, is challenging since the dataset can be extremely large and manual annotation is labour intensive if not impossible. We provide a method of automatically annotating airborne LiDAR data for individual trees or tree regions by filtering out the ground measurements and then using the number of returns embedded in the dataset. The method is validated on a manually annotated dataset for Dublin city with promising results.