Cluster-Based Wood–Leaf Separation Method for Forest Plots Using Terrestrial Laser Scanning Data

Successfully separating wood and leaves in forest plots is a prerequisite for measuring structural parameters and reconstructing 3D forest models. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) can distinguish between the leaves and wood of trees through precise and dense point clouds. However, most existing wood–leaf separation methods face significant accuracy issues, especially in dense forests, due to the complications introduced by canopy shading. In this study, we propose a method to separate the wood and leaves in forest plots using the clustering features of TLS data. The method first filters a point cloud to remove the ground points, and then clusters the point cloud using a region-growing algorithm. Next, the clusters are processed based on their sizes and numbers of points for preliminary separation. Chaos Distance is introduced to characterize the observation that wood points are more orderly while leaf points are more chaotic and disorganized. Lastly, the clusters’ Chaos Distance is used for the final separation. Three representative plots were used to validate this method, achieving an average accuracy of 0.938, a precision of 0.927, a recall of 0.892, and an F1 score of 0.907. The three sample plots were processed in 5.18, 3.75, and 14.52 min, demonstrating high efficiency. Comparing the results with the LeWoS and RF models showed that our method better addresses the accuracy issues of complex canopy structures.