Scan is an interactive software to build and edit a plant architecture from a TLS cloud.

Reconstructing plant architecture from terrestrial laser scan point clouds is needed to build detailed plant mock­ups useful for agronomists, botanists and forest scientists applications. This issue is addressed by several methods [1] [2] [3] ​that are mostly automatic approaches. However this issue remains a challenging problem because automatic methods can fail sometimes, for instance when missing zones in the point cloud result in discontinuous axes. In the end, users often need an interactive tool to edit and complete the work with expert knowledge. We propose AMAPstudio­Scan, a software to build or edit plant topology and geometry by selecting interactive tools and clicking in the point cloud. The software reduces the visible data resolution to keep the display of heavy point clouds responsive and proposes a feature to focus in a given spherical zone.

Topology is displayed over the point cloud and represented as a tree graph with vertices and edges. Each vertex is defined by a disk (a center, a radius and a normal) and edges by two vertices and an axis identifier.

To add a new vertex, the user draws a rough center and radius, then a strategy computes a fitted disk.

Alternative strategies are proposed based on several approaches (e.g. ellipse fitting, ellipsoid fitting, projected convex hull). A preview shows the selected vertex with its local point cloud and proposes extra interactive manual edition. AMAPstudio­Scan is under development and aims at being complementary to the automatic methods by importing plant reconstruction from other software for edition. Finally, it’s possible to export to AMAPstudio­ Xplo for structure edition, data extraction and 3D mesh visualisation.

A screenshot of the Scan GUI

References

[1] Hackenberg, J.; Spiecker, H.; Calders, K.; Disney, M.; Raumonen, P.: SimpleTree —An Efficient Open Source Tool to Build Tree Models from TLS Clouds. Forests 2015, 6, pp. 4245­4294.

[2] Yan, D.M., Wintz, J., Mourrain, B., Wang, W., Boudon, F., Godin, C.: Efficient and robust reconstruction of botanical branching structure from laser scanned points. In: 11th IEEE International Conference on Computer­Aided Design and Computer Graphics, 2009. CAD/Graphics’ 09, pp. 572–575. IEEE (2009)

[3] Delagrange S, Jauvin C, Rochon P.: PypeTree: A Tool for Reconstructing Tree Perennial Tissues from Point Clouds. Sensors (Basel, Switzerland). 2014;14(3):4271­4289. doi:10.3390/s140304271.