Processing laser scanner plant data to extract structural information

Plant architecture information has traditionally used the hierarchical structure of the plant as its basis, with digitised point data from real plants entered in a particular hierarchical pattern. Data collection and classification have thus been inseparable. The advent of laser profile scanners, such as the Polhemus FastSCAN, means that 3D plant data can be captured holistically. The data acquired from laser surface scanners is in unordered point cloud form, with points collected only on the surface of the object under study. This means that the structure of the plant must be extracted from the cloud of 3D coordinates using manual methods. This paper describes issues arising when using a Polhemus FastSCAN laser scanner, and a program for manual extraction of points developed at the Advanced Computational Modelling Centre (ACMC), which can be used independently or with specialised software such as FloraDig.