In this research report the authors explain their methodology for identifying individual tree crowns using the topology of the forest. The proposed approach captures the topological structure of the forest in hierarchical data structures, quantifies topological relationships of tree crown components in a weighted graph, and finally partitions the graph to separate individual tree crowns.
More than introducing a segmentation algorithm, this paper proposes a powerful framework featuring flexibility to support a series of segmentation methods including some of those recurring in the tree segmentation literature. The segmentation method may extend its applications to any data of topological nature or data that has a topological equivalent.
