Mobile LiDAR Scanning System Combined with Canopy Morphology Extracting Methods for Tree Crown Parameters Evaluation in Orchards

To meet the demand for canopy morphological parameter measurements in orchards, a mobile scanning system is designed based on the 3D Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm. The system uses a lightweight LiDAR-Inertial Measurement Unit (LiDAR-IMU) state estimator and a rotation-constrained optimization algorithm to reconstruct a point cloud map of the orchard. Then, Statistical Outlier Removal (SOR) filtering and European clustering algorithms are used to segment the orchard point cloud from which the ground information has been separated, and the k-nearest neighbour (KNN) search algorithm is used to restore the filtered point cloud. Finally, the height of the fruit trees and the volume of the canopy are obtained by the point cloud statistical method and the 3D alpha-shape algorithm. To verify the algorithm, tracked robots equipped with LIDAR and an IMU are used in a standardized orchard. Experiments show that the system in this paper can reconstruct the orchard point cloud environment with high accuracy and can obtain the point cloud information of all fruit trees in the orchard environment. The accuracy of point cloud-based segmentation of fruit trees in the orchard is 95.4%. The R(2) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) values of crown height are 0.93682 and 0.04337, respectively, and the corresponding values of canopy volume are 0.8406 and 1.5738, respectively. In summary, this system achieves a good evaluation result of orchard crown information and has important application value in the intelligent measurement of fruit trees.