Good Morning all!
The following question was posted on one of my LinkedIn pages: "How to do the Tree counting using LiDAR Point cloud?
*         I thought that some of the foresters on the list serve might be interested in the responses.
*
Tristan
Tristan Stuckenberg<https://www.linkedin.com/groups?viewMemberFeed=&gid=1770697&memberID=83058731>
GIS Specialist at Esri South Africa
Hi Mahipal,

There are several software packages that claim to be able to do this, how well depends on the density of laser return and how clearly individual trees are captured. As a general rule of thumb if you can't clearly distinguish individual trees in the point cloud you're going to have a hard time. I know TerraScan and ENVI LiDAR both have modules to identify and subsequently count trees. An alternative is to use FUSION, which is free, if you lack either of the aforementioned software packages. You can download it from http://forsys.cfr.washington.edu/<https://www.linkedin.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fforsys%2Ecfr%2Ewashington%2Eedu%2F&urlhash=DaEi&_t=tracking_disc> and you will have to create a Canopy Height Model (CHM) and then use the CanopyMaxima script in DOS to count trees. To optimise results you will likely have to modify the moving window parameters considerably.

An alternative approach is to use watershed segmentation on a CHM but I haven't personally had much luck with this approach. Good luck and let me know how it goes.


Jonathan Gale<https://www.linkedin.com/groups?viewMemberFeed=&gid=1770697&memberID=175475227>
Solution Engineer and Part-time Lecturer, College of Professional Studies at Northeastern University
Try LIDAR Analyst. It will extract and attribute approx 10,000 tree points per minute. You can download a demo copy for free to run through the tutorials and see if it is what you are looking for. You can then request an evaluation license to test the software on your own data. During your evaluation period you can work with the product support team to help you optimize your results and develop proof of concept. Otherwise there used to be a good research article out there by Yunsheng Wang that shows you how to do this with ArcGIS and Fusion. It's a tough nut to crack but I've helped people do it for quite a while now - before LIDAR was cool ;


Joseph Young
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