A Tree Point Cloud Simplification Method Based on FPFH Information Entropy

• Published in: Forests Vol. 14; no. 7; p. 1507
• Main Authors: Hu, Chenming, Ru, Yu, Fang, Shuping, Zhou, Hongping, Xue, Jiangkun, Zhang, Yuheng, Li, Jianping, Xu, Guopeng, Fan, Gaoming
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.07.2023
• Subjects: Cloud computing; Entropy; Entropy (Information theory); Forestry research; Forests; FPFH; Genetic algorithms; Histograms; information entropy; Lidar; Methods; Metric space; Neighborhoods; Objective function; Optical radar; Optimization; point cloud; point cloud simplification; Simplification; Statistical sampling; Surveys; China
• ISSN: 1999-4907; 1999-4907
• DOI: 10.3390/f14071507

LiDAR technology has been widely used in forest survey and research, but the high-resolution point cloud data generated by LiDAR equipment also pose challenges in storage and computing. To address this problem, we propose a point cloud simplification method for trees, which considers both higher similarity to the original point cloud and the area of the tree point cloud. The method first determines the optimal search neighborhood using the standard deviation of FPFH information entropy. Based on FPFH information entropy and Poisson disc sampling theory, the point cloud is partitioned and sampled. By optimizing the separation thresholds of significant feature points and less significant feature points using a genetic algorithm with the Hausdorff distance and point cloud area as the objective function, the final simplified point cloud is obtained. Validation with two point cloud data sets shows that the proposed method achieves good retention of the area information of the original point cloud while ensuring point cloud quality. The research provides new approaches and techniques for processing large-scale forest LiDAR scan point clouds, reducing storage and computing requirements. This can improve the efficiency of forest surveys and monitoring.