Cloth simulation-based construction of pitfree canopy height models from airborne LiDAR data

Background:The universal occurrence of randomly distributed dark holes(i.e.,data pits appearing within the tree crown)in LiDAR-derived canopy height models(CHMs)negatively affects the accuracy of extracted forest inventory parameters.Methods:We develop an algorithm based on cloth simulation for constructing a pit-free CHM.Results:The proposed algorithm effectively fills data pits of various sizes whilst preserving canopy details.Our pitfree CHMs derived from point clouds at different proportions of data pits are remarkably better than those constructed using other algorithms,as evidenced by the lowest average root mean square error(0.4981 m)between the reference CHMs and the constructed pit-free CHMs.Moreover,our pit-free CHMs show the best performance overall in terms of maximum tree height estimation(average bias=0.9674 m).Conclusion:The proposed algorithm can be adopted when working with different quality LiDAR data and shows high potential in forestry applications.

Quantification of occlusions influencing the tree stem curve retrieving from single-scan terrestrial laser scanning data

Background: The stem curve of standing trees is an essential parameter for accurate estimation of stem volume.This study aims to directly quantify the occlusions within the single-scan terrestrial laser scanning(TLS) data,evaluate its correlation with the accuracy of the retrieved stem curves, and subsequently, to assess the capacity of single-scan TLS to estimate stem curves.Methods: We proposed an index, occlusion rate, to quantify the occlusion level in TLS data. We then analyzed three influencing factors for the occlusion rate: the percentage of basal area near the scanning center, the scanning distance and the source of occlusions. Finally, we evaluated the effects of occlusions on stem curve estimates from single-scan TLS data.Results: The results showed that the correlations between the occlusion rate and the stem curve estimation accuracies were strong(r = 0.60–0.83), so was the correlations between the occlusion rate and its influencing factors(r = 0.84–0.99). It also showed that the occlusions from tree stems were the main factor of the low detection rate of stems, while the non-stem components mainly influenced the completeness of the retrieved stem curves.Conclusions: Our study demonstrates that the occlusions significantly affect the accuracy of stem curve retrieval from the single-scan TLS data in a typical-size(32 m × 32 m) forest plot. However, the single-scan mode has the capacity to accurately estimate the stem curve in a small forest plot(< 10 m × 10 m) or a plot with a lower occlusion rate, such as less than 35% in our tested datasets. The findings from this study are useful for guiding the practice of retrieving forest parameters using single-scan TLS data.

Seamless integration of above-and undercanopy unmanned aerial vehicle laser scanning for forest investigation

Background:Current automated forest investigation is facing a dilemma over how to achieve high tree-and plotlevel completeness while maintaining a high cost and labor efficiency.This study tackles the challenge by exploring a new concept that enables an efficient fusion of aerial and terrestrial perspectives for digitizing and characterizing individual trees in forests through an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV)that flies above and under canopies in a single operation.The advantage of such concept is that the aerial perspective from the above-canopy UAV and the terrestrial perspective from the under-canopy UAV can be seamlessly integrated in one flight,thus grants the access to simultaneous high completeness,high efficiency,and low cost.Results:In the experiment,an approximately 0.5 ha forest was covered in ca.10 min from takeoff to landing.The GNSS-IMU based positioning supports a geometric accuracy of the produced point cloud that is equivalent to that of the mobile mapping systems,which leads to a 2–4 cm RMSE of the diameter at the breast height estimates,and a 4–7 cm RMSE of the stem curve estimates.Conclusions:Results of the experiment suggested that the integrated flight is capable of combining the high completeness of upper canopies from the above-canopy perspective and the high completeness of stems from the terrestrial perspective.Thus,it is a solution to combine the advantages of the terrestrial static,the mobile,and the above-canopy UAV observations,which is a promising step forward to achieve a fully autonomous in situ forest inventory.Future studies should be aimed to further improve the platform positioning,and to automatize the UAV operation.

Automated registration of wide-baseline point clouds in forests using discrete overlap search

Forest is one of the most challenging environments to be recorded in a three-dimensional(3D)digitized geometrical representation,because of the size and the complexity of the environment and the data-acquisition constraints brought by on-site conditions.Previous studies have indicated that the data-acquisition pattern can have more influence on the registration results than other factors.In practice,the ideal short-baseline observations,i.e.,the dense collection mode,is rarely feasible,considering the low accessibility in forest environments and the commonly limited labor and time resources.The wide-baseline observations that cover a forest site using a few folds less observations than short-baseline observations,are therefore more preferable and commonly applied.Nevertheless,the wide-baseline approach is more challenging for data registration since it typically lacks the required sufficient overlaps between datasets.Until now,a robust automated registration solution that is independent of special hardware requirements has still been missing.That is,the registration accuracy is still far from the required level,and the information extractable from the merged point cloud using automated registration could not match that from the merged point cloud using manual registration.This paper proposes a discrete overlap search(DOS)method to find correspondences in the point clouds to solve the low-overlap problem in the wide-baseline point clouds.The proposed automatic method uses potential correspondences from both original data and selected feature points to reconstruct rough observation geometries without external knowledge and to retrieve precise registration parameters at data-level.An extensive experiment was carried out with 24 forest datasets of different conditions categorized in three difficulty levels.The performance of the proposed method was evaluated using various accuracy criteria,as well as based on data acquired from different hardware,platforms,viewing perspectives,and at different points of time.The proposed method achieved a 3D registration accuracy at a 0.50-cm level in all difficulty categories using static terrestrial acquisitions.In the terrestrial-aerial registration,data sets were collected from different sensors and at different points of time with scene changes,and a registration accuracy at the raw data geometric accuracy level was achieved.These results represent the highest automated registration accuracy and the strictest evaluation so far.The proposed method is applicable in multiple scenarios,such as 1)the global positioning of individual under-canopy observations,which is one of the main challenges in applying terrestrial observations lacking a global context,2)the fusion of point clouds acquired from terrestrial and aerial perspectives,which is required in order to achieve a complete forest observation,3)mobile mapping using a new stop-and-go approach,which solves the problems of lacking mobility and slow data collection in static terrestrial measurements as well as the data-quality issue in the continuous mobile approach.Furthermore,this work proposes a new error estimate that units all parameter-level errors into a single quantity and compensates for the downsides of the widely used parameter-and object-level error estimates;it also proposes a new deterministic point sets registration method as an alternative to the popular sampling methods.

Individual tree extraction from terrestrial laser scanning data via graph pathing

Background:Individual tree extraction from terrestrial laser scanning(TLS)data is a prerequisite for tree-scale estimations of forest biophysical properties.This task currently is undertaken through laborious and time-consuming manual assistance and quality control.This study presents a new fully automatic approach to extract single trees from large-area TLS data.This data-driven method operates exclusively on a point cloud graph by path finding,which makes our method computationally efficient and universally applicable to data from various forest types.Results:We demonstrated the proposed method on two openly available datasets.First,we achieved state-of-the-art performance on locating single trees on a benchmark dataset by significantly improving the mean accuracy by over 10% especially for difficult forest plots.Second,we successfully extracted 270 trees from one hectare temperate forest.Quantitative validation resulted in a mean Intersection over Union(mIoU)of 0.82 for single crown segmentation,which further led to a relative root mean square error(RMSE%)of 21.2% and 23.5% for crown area and tree volume estimations,respectively.Conclusions:Our method allows automated access to individual tree level information from TLS point clouds.The proposed method is free from restricted assumptions of forest types.It is also computationally efficient with an average processing time of several seconds for one million points.It is expected and hoped that our method would contribute to TLS-enabled wide-area forest qualifications,ranging from stand volume and carbon stocks modelling to derivation of tree functional traits as part of the global ecosystem understanding.

建筑物自动变化检测方法的测试

数据库的更新(尤其是二维建筑物数据库)已经成为一个热门话题,特别是在较为发达的国家。在这些国家里,二维建筑物数据库已经在近十年来完成。主要问题集中在长期及费时的变化检测步骤,这些步骤可能通过最近获取的传感器数据实现自动化。目前在此领域的自动化与经验的缺乏已经促使EuroSDR开展一项当前最先进的不同变化检测方法比较的实验。本文的主要目的是介绍实验的背景和三种不同数据(航拍图像、卫星图像和激光雷达)获得的结果。此外,我们给出了实验中的一些发现以及未来为了建立一个有效的系统所要努力的方向。

Fast registration of forest terrestrial laser scans using key points detected from crowns and stems

Registration of TLS data is an important prerequisite to overcome the limitations of occlusion.Most existing registration methods rely on stems to determine the transformation parameters.However,the complexity of the registration problem increases dramatically as the number of stems grows.It is tricky to reduce the stems and determine the valid ones that can provide reliable registration transformation without a knowledge of the two scans.This paper presents an automatic and fast registration of TLS point clouds in forest areas.It reduces stems by selecting from the overlap areas,which are recovered from the mode-based key points that are detected from crowns.The proposed method was tested in a managed forest in Finland,and was compared with the stem-based registration method without reducing stems.The experiments demonstrated that the mean rotation error was 2.09′,and the mean errors in horizontal and vertical translation were 1.13 and 7.21 cm,respectively.Compared with the stem-based method,the proposed method improves the registration efficiency significantly(818 s vs 96 s)and achieves similar results in terms of the mean registration errors(1.94′for rotation error,0.83 and 7.38 cm for horizontal and vertical translation error,respectively).

TLS-bridged co-prediction of tree-level multifarious stem structure variables from worldview-2 panchromatic imagery: a case study of the boreal forest

In forest ecosystem studies,tree stem structure variables(SSVs)proved to be an essential kind of parameters,and now simultaneously deriving SSVs of as many kinds as possible at large scales is preferred for enhancing the frontier studies on marcoecosystem ecology and global carbon cycle.For this newly emerging task,satellite imagery such as WorldView-2 panchromatic images(WPIs)is used as a potential solution for co-prediction of tree-level multifarious SSVs,with static terrestrial laser scanning(TLS)assumed as a‘bridge’.The specific operation is to pursue the allometric relationships between TLS-derived SSVs and WPI-derived feature parameters,and regression analyses with one or multiple explanatory variables are applied to deduce the prediction models(termed as Model1s and Model2s).In the case of Picea abies,Pinus sylvestris,Populus tremul and Quercus robur in a boreal forest,tests showed that Model1s and Model2s for different tree species can be derived(e.g.the maximum R^(2)=0.574 for Q.robur).Overall,this study basically validated the algorithm proposed for co-prediction of multifarious SSVs,and the contribution is equivalent to developing a viable solution for SSV-estimation upscaling,which is useful for large-scale investigations of forest understory,macroecosystem ecology,global vegetation dynamics and global carbon cycle.