Laser scanning is an effective tool for acquiring geometric attributes of trees and vegetation, which lays a solid foundation for 3-dimensional tree modelling. Existing studies on tree modelling from laser scanning data are vast. However, some works cannot guarantee sufficient modelling accuracy, while some other works are mainly rule-based and therefore highly depend on user inputs. In this paper, we propose a novel method to accurately and automatically reconstruct detailed 3D tree models from laser scans. We first extract an initial tree skeleton from the input point cloud by establishing a minimum spanning tree using the Dijkstra shortest-path algorithm. Then, the initial tree skeleton is pruned by iteratively removing redundant components. After that, an optimization-based approach is performed to fit a sequence of cylinders to approximate the geometry of the tree branches. Experiments on various types of trees from different data sources demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method. The overall fitting error (i.e., the distance between the input points and the output model) is less than 10 cm. The reconstructed tree models can be further applied in the precise estimation of tree attributes, urban landscape visualization, etc. The source code of this work is freely available at https://github.com/tudelft3d/adtree

Heegaard diagrams on the boundary of a handlebody are studied from the dynamics systems point of view. A relationship between the strongly irreducible condition of CassonGordan and the Masur's domain of discontinuity for the action of the handlebody group is established.

We prove a quantitative bi-Lipschitz non-embedding theorem for the Heisenberg group with its Carnot–Carathéodory metric and apply it to give a lower bound on the integrality gap of the Goemans–Linial semidefinite relaxation of the sparsest cut problem.

We make the elementary observation that the Lagrangian submanifolds of$C$^{$n$},$n$≥3, constructed by Ekholm, Eliashberg, Murphy and Smith are non-uniruled and, moreover, have infinite relative Gromov width. The construction of these submanifolds involve exact Lagrangian caps, which obviously are non-uniruled in themselves. This property is also used to show that if a Legendrian submanifold inside a contactisation admits an exact Lagrangian cap, then its Chekanov–Eliashberg algebra is acyclic.

In this article, we continue the work in Guan-Li and study a normalized hypersurface flow in the more general ambient setting of warped product spaces. This flow preserves the volume of the bounded domain enclosed by a graphical hypersurface, and monotonically decreases the hypersurface area. As an application, the isoperimetric problem in warped product spaces is solved for such domains.