An application of triangle mesh models in detecting patterns of vegetation

Abstract

This contribution presents the results of a work in progress, attempting to use discrete curvature for triangle meshes in order to automatically identify specific structures in remote sensing data. Specifically, the focus was on determining isolated trees, on the basis of data acquired through airborne laser scanning. Five methods for discrete curvatures were tested and compared for a triangle mesh derived from a high density point cloud. The best performance was obtained for the mean curvature computed by using the shape operator.