Efficient Registration of Forest Point Clouds by Global Matching of Relative Stem Positions

Registering point clouds of forest environments is an essential prerequisite for LiDAR applications in precision forestry. State-of-the-art methods for forest point cloud registration require the extraction of individual tree attributes, and they have an efficiency bottleneck when dealing with point clouds of real-world forests with dense trees. We propose an automatic, robust, and efficient method for the registration of forest point clouds. Our approach first locates tree stems from raw point clouds and then matches the stems based on their relative spatial relationship to determine the registration transformation. In contrast to existing methods, our algorithm requires no extra individual tree attributes and has linear complexity to the number of trees in the environment, allowing it to align point clouds of large forest environments. Extensive experiments have revealed that our method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods regarding registration accuracy and robustness, and it significantly outperforms existing techniques in terms of efficiency. Besides, we introduce a new benchmark dataset that complements the very few existing open datasets for the development and evaluation of registration methods for forest point clouds. The source code of our method and the dataset are available at https://github.com/zexinyang/AlignTree.