Individual tree segmentation based on mean shift and crown shape model for temperate forest

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) provides high-resolution geometric information for monitoring forests at individual tree crown (ITC) level. An important task for ITC delineation is segmentation, and previous studies showed that the adaptive 3-D mean shift (AMS3D) algorithm provides effective results. AMS3D for ITC segmentation has three components for the kernel profile: shape, weight, and size. In this letter, we present an AMS3D approach based on the adaptation of the kernel profile size through an ellipsoid crown shape model. The algorithm parameters are estimated based on allometry equations derived from 22 forest plots in two study sites. After computing the mean shift (MS) vector, we initialize the parameters of the ellipsoid crown shape model to derive the kernel profile size, and further tested two crown shape models for adapting the size of the superellipsoid (SE) kernel profile. These schemes are compared with two other MS algorithms with and without kernel profile size adaptation. We select the best algorithm output per plot based on the maximum F1-score. The ellipsoid crown shape model with a SE kernel profile of n = 1.5 presents the highest recall and the best Jaccard index, especially for conifers