RANSAC Shape Detection Plugin-Cylinders merging for estimating volume of trees

[Suman]

Greetings from Nepal,
I am doing undergraduate research on biomass estimation using Terrestrial Laser Scanner ( Faro Focus 3D). I found the RANSAC shape detection plugin very useful for estimating volume. However, the outputs which i obtained from the test data consisting only 3 trees were around 350+ cylinders whose radius and height are known.

Is there any easy way to merge the volume of all the cylinders belonging to the same tree.If there is any,it could be very useful for estimation of volume easily and ultimately would result in easy calculation of Biomass of the forest area.

Thank you. Looking forward to your reply.

Best Regards,
Suman

[daniel]

Nope, you would have to develop a new function to do this.

[OMG20Centz]

Or you can set the "Minimum support points per primitive" to a higher value, so that it will decrease the amount of cylinders detected.
What works fine for me is to isolate each object (in your case : each tree) as a single pointcloud, and perform the RANSAC shape detection by setting that coefficient to half of the amount of objects detected (and decrease that number if nothing's detected).