LiDAR-Forest Dataset: LiDAR Point Cloud Simulation Dataset for Forestry Application

The popularity of LiDAR devices and sensor technology has gradually empowered users from autonomous driving to forest monitoring, and research on 3D LiDAR has made remarkable progress over the years. Unlike 2D images, whose focused area is visible and rich in texture information, understanding the point distribution can help companies and researchers find better ways to develop point-based 3D applications. In this work, we contribute an unreal-based LiDAR simulation tool and a 3D simulation dataset named LiDAR-Forest, which can be used by various studies to evaluate forest reconstruction, tree DBH estimation, and point cloud compression for easy visualization. The simulation is customizable in tree species, LiDAR types and scene generation, with low cost and high efficiency.

DeepTree: Modeling Trees with Situated Latents

In this paper, we propose DeepTree, a novel method for modeling trees based on learning developmental rules for branching structures instead of manually defining them. We call our deep neural model situated latent because its behavior is determined by the intrinsic state -- encoded as a latent space of a deep neural model -- and by the extrinsic (environmental) data that is situated as the location in the 3D space and on the tree structure. We use a neural network pipeline to train a situated latent space that allows us to locally predict branch growth only based on a single node in the branch graph of a tree model. We use this representation to progressively develop new branch nodes, thereby mimicking the growth process of trees. Starting from a root node, a tree is generated by iteratively querying the neural network on the newly added nodes resulting in the branching structure of the whole tree. Our method enables generating a wide variety of tree shapes without the need to define intricate parameters that control their growth and behavior. Furthermore, we show that the situated latents can also be used to encode the environmental response of tree models, e.g., when trees grow next to obstacles. We validate the effectiveness of our method by measuring the similarity of our tree models and by procedurally generated ones based on a number of established metrics for tree form.