Individual Tree Crown Segmentation of a Larch Plantation Using Airborne Laser Scanning Data Based on Region Growing and Canopy Morphology Features
, Yong Pang 1,*, Di Wang 3, Xiaojun Liang 1, Bowei Chen 1,4, Hao Lu 1,5, Holger Weinacker 2 and Barbara Koch 2Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Reviewer comments
The introduction provided adequate background and include relevant references. The research was properly designed, however, there are a few recommendations provided below that should help improve the quality of the presentation.
- Introduction
Line 96 to 98 – rewrite sentence and revise sentence structure, be sure to use the correct section numbers in Arabic numerals and not Roman numerals.
- Study Site and Datasets
Line 103 to 104 – What are the implications of the dominant tree species? How could they impact the study or conditions under which the ITC is applied? Expand your discussion of the study area.
Line 126 – Please fix the section heading. Is this supposed to be setion 2.3? should the heading be something like “Ground Survey data?”
- Methods
Line 138 – pluralize “method” by adding an s at the end
Line 167 – “…section III. B.” The reader should be able to tell immediately what you are referring to. Be more specific and use Arabic numerals instead of Roman numerals.
Line 169 to 176 – You should introduce the subsections that comes under this section in this paragraph. You mentioned “vertically projected” but there was no mention of profile selection nor profile processing anywhere.
Line 177 – Subsection numbering is inconsistent, should be 3.2.1 instead of 3.1.1.
Line 178 – “Profile definition.” Is not necessary, instead, instead, use a sentence to state the point you are trying to make.
Line 188 – Subsection numbering is inconsistent, should be 3.2.2 instead of 3.1.2.
Line 189 – “Profile selection.” Is repetitive, consider deleting
Line 208 to 213 – Shorten figure captions. Ensure that your figure captions fit on the same page with the figure. Instead of making the figure caption into a paragraph, why not discuss the content of the figure after it was first mentioned in the body of the paper?
Line 220 to 225 – Same comment as above, shorten figure captions.
Line 226 – Should this be a separate subsection, maybe section 3.2.3?
Move Table 2 from line 276 to immediately after line 243.
Line 267 to 275 – Figure and caption should fit together on one page.
- Results AND Discussion
Line 308 – Fix section and subsections headings. This should be section 4 not section 3. Additionally, I would suggest combining results with discussions here.
- Conclusions
While you may combine the discussion of the results with the results section, the conclusions section should be kept separate. There should be no figures, table or citations in the conclusions section. This section should highlight the major findings of the research, their significance of the results in this study to the broader field of remote sensing and LIDAR data application.
Line 423 to 434 – I suspect this is the conclusions drawn from this study, but this should be expanded to include any additional key findings. In line 27 to 30 of the abstract, you highlighted some key results, those should be restated in the conclusions as well but this time stating the significance of these results.
Author Contributions
section missing
Conflicts of Interest
section missing
References
In general, there is a lot of inconsistencies in the reference list. Be sure to follow the MDPI style guide. List all authors instead of et al., The year of the publication is not in the correct place etc. Other specific comments:
Line 436 – incomplete reference, please fix.
Line 437 – change all caps.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
On behalf of my co-authors, I would like to resubmit the enclosed manuscript entitled " Individual Tree Crown Segmentation of Larch Plantation using Airborne Laser Scanning Data based on Region Growing and Canopy Morphology Features", which we wish to be considered for publication in Remote Sensing.
In this revised version, we have carefully revised our manuscript and uploaded the revised version together with the responses to the reviewers in the system.
Thank you very much again for your time and consideration.
Sincerely yours
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
This work entitled “Individual Tree Crown Segmentation of Larch Plantation using ALS Data based on Region Growing and Canopy Morphology Features” is a very interesting approach, specially the results due to they show a good advance in the ITC classification, but in general the work needs to be organized in order to present a scientific research.
It is necessary to use ALS or LiDAR in the whole document, the use of the two concepts distract the attention of the reader.
Line 115. Finial instead of final? it is recommended to carefully check spaces and typing mistakes in the document.
Line 126. The is redundancy of 2.2 ALS data.
It is necessary to explain how the methods are implemented and what software is used. So, I recommend to carefully explain this issue in methods section.
Also, it is necessary to indicate where or how the region growing method was implemented. In addition, it is important to expand the explanation about the use of thresholds, there is only indicated that small values produce over segmentation and big values produce loss of possible trees allocated in the analysed area.
Check all Figures, in order to organise them correctly, labels are missing or misplaced and parts in one page. Also it is required to improve the quality of Figures, because it is not possible to clearly depict numbers and labels.
It is necessary a carefully review of the document in order to avoid grammatical mistakes.
Also it is necessary to review units, use of abbreviations and capital letters, as examples:
- m2 instead m2, ha-1, it is not properly represented
It is common to use brackets to place units, see Table 1.
Use Fig. or Figure.
Also use x – y plane or X – Y plane
Line 288. There is an extra period in “are computed.”
The Discussion and Conclusion section need to be separated in order to clearly understand the findings of the research.
Review all references. As example, in Reference 22, 41, 44, 45; some information is missing.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
On behalf of my co-authors, I would like to resubmit the enclosed manuscript entitled " Individual Tree Crown Segmentation of Larch Plantation using Airborne Laser Scanning Data based on Region Growing and Canopy Morphology Features", which we wish to be considered for publication in Remote Sensing.
In this revised version, we have carefully revised our manuscript and uploaded the revised version together with the responses to the reviewers in the system.
Thank you very much again for your time and consideration.
Sincerely yours
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors presented an interesting work. However, there are some questions to be solved/clarified:
*Line 96-98: Add the description of section II too.
*Line 115: Please expand the part related to the final registration error. For example: What are those values? mean error? Standard deviation?
*Line 117: How were filtered the ground points? What algorithm was used?
*Line 118: Convert the url link to a reference.
*Figure 1: Improve the font size of the color bar (it is barely legible). Also state that it is shown the height.
*Lines 178 and 189: Remove the initial sentence (too short).
*Line 195: Authors fixed a 4 meter threshold to remove sub-arboreal vegetation. Can authors estimate which would be the minimum tree height to be detected by this approach due to this specific threshold.
*Figure 6 and 7. The font size is too small as well as the legend. Please redraw the figure for a better readability. In figure 7 use the same limits for the residual axis.
*Section 3.3. Please clarify the selection of the number of clusters. This value is determined automatically or set by the final user?
*Lines 369-380: Rewrite the paragraph since a lot of sentences are fragmented and/or too short.
*Along all the document, add a space between the magnitude and the unit.
*Please check the references format to follow the journal guidelines.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
On behalf of my co-authors, I would like to resubmit the enclosed manuscript entitled " Individual Tree Crown Segmentation of Larch Plantation using Airborne Laser Scanning Data based on Region Growing and Canopy Morphology Features", which we wish to be considered for publication in Remote Sensing.
In this revised version, we have carefully revised our manuscript and uploaded the revised version together with the responses to the reviewers in the system.
Thank you very much again for your time and consideration.
Sincerely yours
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Authors have addressed the issues i pointed out, now the manuscript is in a much improved shape. The figures are lovely and enhances the quality of the paper.
Reviewer 2 Report
Thanks so much for the authors reply.
But it is necessary to improve some small parts of edition, for example: eliminate the comments and changes into the document, also correct some typing and extra spaces in the text. See the Pdf document upload as final version.
In this sense the manuscript deserves to be published.
