Reconstructing coniferous tree crown shape from incomplete point clouds using deep learning

Abstract

Individual tree structure plays a key role in forest monitoring, biomass estimation, and ecological assessment. However, ground-based remote sensing methods such as terrestrial and mobile laser scanning frequently produce incomplete point clouds due to occlusion, particularly in the upper canopy. This limits the accuracy of derived structural metrics such as tree height or crown volume. In this study, we present a novel deep learning-based method to reconstruct the outer crown shape of coniferous trees from incomplete point clouds. Instead of completing the full tree structure, we focus on predicting the alpha-shape of the crown, enabling a more efficient and generalizable approach for structural reconstruction. We train a geometry-aware transformer model (AdaPoinTr) on synthetically generated partial tree crowns and evaluate its performance across three independent datasets encompassing different forest types and acquisition conditions. The model consistently improved crown shape similarity metrics and reduced height estimation errors compared to using partial data alone (reduced bias from -11% to -3.5%). Our results demonstrate that this shape-based strategy enables the extraction of key tree-level parameters from incomplete data, offering a practical solution for gaining improved 3D forest structural information from cost-sensitive or logistically constrained forest monitoring acquisitions.