Discrimination method of forked larch trees

For the demands of automatic pruning, an effective discrimination rule of the forked and non-forked larch trees is established. First, information of trunk and branch diameters of a larch plantations was collected from the west mountain of Beijing. The growth characteristics of the forked and non-forked trees were studied. Given the statistical characteristics of the trunk and branch diameters, a discriminant function of the forked branch and non-forked larch trees was established statistically. Excellent discrimination results were obtained by the function and the rule. The study presents an effective discrimination rule to separate forked trees from straight trees for automatic pruning.