Papers › Smart-Tree: Neural Medial Axis Approximation of Point Clouds for 3D Tree Skeletonization

Smart-Tree: Neural Medial Axis Approximation of Point Clouds for 3D Tree Skeletonization

21 Mar 2023arXiv:2303.11560archive 2025-07-28

Harry Dobbs, Oliver Batchelor, Richard Green, James Atlas

This paper introduces Smart-Tree, a supervised method for approximating the medial axes of branch skeletons from a tree point cloud. Smart-Tree uses a sparse voxel convolutional neural network to extract the radius and direction towards the medial axis of each input point. A greedy algorithm performs robust skeletonization using the estimated medial axis. Our proposed method provides robustness to complex tree structures and improves fidelity when dealing with self-occlusions, complex geometry, touching branches, and varying point densities. We evaluate Smart-Tree using a multi-species synthetic tree dataset and perform qualitative analysis on a real-world tree point cloud. Our experimentation with synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrates the robustness of our approach over the current state-of-the-art method. The dataset and source code are publicly available.

PaperPDFCode

Code

uc-vision/synthetic-trees officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report
uc-vision/smart-tree officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections