Quantitative Structure Models

Summary of how Quantitative Structure Models are reconstructed, and how they are being utilized. The process starts with the laser scanning of a forest. The produced point cloud contains millions of points, and numerous trees. The point cloud is segmented automatically into trees and then into branches. Each branch is reconstructed by fitting several cylinders to the data. The branching topology is stored together with the geometric structure to a single tree model, which is called a Quantitative Structure Model (QSM). QSMs can be used in many applications, as they allow easy access to tree properties, such as, volume, area, branch count, crown shape, taper curve, and size distribution. These properties can be used by forest scientists, forest industry, and forest owners to, e.g., evaluate the current or future state of a forest, or its value. The model properties can also be used for automatic species recognition. Furthermore, QSMs can be visualized in various ways to produce realistic virtual representations of locations, such as, national or city parks, for the travel industry. The models can be textured and augmented with leaves to achieve either a realistic or a fantasy look, to suite the needs of game developers. For more information about QSMs, please visit the groups homepage, or watch the other videos on the topic: "3D Forest Information" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wANRdliE1zQ) and "Cylinder reconstruction" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0Emjwp-fmU). This animation was produced by the Inverse Problems research group in the Department of Mathematics at Tampere University of Technology (http://math.tut.fi/inversegroup). Animation created using Blender (http://www.blender.org). Music: "Delay Rock" by Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Textures: "Bark 0007" xoio (xoio.de) "Cherry Leaf" BrianHanson2nd (deviantart.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ The animation builds upon but does not directly feature the "Prunus avium - Cherry Tree" point cloud data by Jan Hackenberg (http://www.simpletree.uni-freiburg.de/openData.html) shared under the Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/