scholarly journals Filtering ground noise from LiDAR returns produces inferior models of forest aboveground biomass

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Mahoney ◽  
Lucas Johnson ◽  
Eddie Bevilacqua ◽  
Colin Beier
Keyword(s):  
Land Cover ◽  
Aboveground Biomass ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Noise Filtering ◽  
Useful Signal ◽  
Lower Accuracy ◽  
Ground Noise ◽  
Forest Aboveground Biomass

Airborne LiDAR has become an essential data source for large-scale, high-resolution modeling of forest biomass and carbon stocks, enabling predictions with much higher resolution and accuracy than can be achieved using optical imagery alone. Ground noise filtering -- that is, excluding returns from LiDAR point clouds based on simple height thresholds -- is a common practice meant to improve the 'signal' content of LiDAR returns by preventing ground returns from masking useful information about tree size and condition contained within canopy returns. Although this procedure originated in LiDAR-based estimation of mean tree and canopy height, ground noise filtering has remained prevalent in LiDAR pre-processing, even as modelers have shifted focus to forest aboveground biomass (AGB) and related characteristics for which ground returns may actually contain useful information about stand density and openness. In particular, ground returns may be helpful for making accurate biomass predictions in heterogeneous landscapes that include a patchy mosaic of vegetation heights and land cover types. In this paper, we applied several ground noise filtering thresholds while mapping two study areas in New York (USA), one a forest-dominated area and the other a mixed-use landscape. We observed that removing ground noise via any height threshold systematically biases many of the LiDAR-derived variables used in AGB modeling. By fitting random forest models to each of these predictor sets, we found that that ground noise filtering yields models of forest AGB with lower accuracy than models trained using predictors derived from unfiltered point clouds. The relative inferiority of AGB models based on filtered LiDAR returns was much greater for the mixed land-cover study area than for the contiguously forested study area. Our results suggest that ground filtering should be avoided when mapping biomass, particularly when mapping heterogeneous and highly patchy landscapes, as ground returns are more likely to represent useful 'signal' than extraneous 'noise' in these cases.

scholarly journals HOLISTIC PARAMETRIC RECONSTRUCTION OF BUILDING MODELS FROM POINT CLOUDS

2020 ◽  
Vol XLIII-B2-2020 ◽  
pp. 689-695
Author(s):  
Z. Li ◽  
W. Zhang ◽  
J. Shan
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Traditional Approach ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Reconstruction Method ◽  
Optimization Strategy ◽  
Building Roof ◽  
Building Model ◽  
Building Models

Abstract. Building models are conventionally reconstructed by building roof points via planar segmentation and then using a topology graph to group the planes together. Roof edges and vertices are then mathematically represented by intersecting segmented planes. Technically, such solution is based on sequential local fitting, i.e., the entire data of one building are not simultaneously participating in determining the building model. As a consequence, the solution is lack of topological integrity and geometric rigor. Fundamentally different from this traditional approach, we propose a holistic parametric reconstruction method which means taking into consideration the entire point clouds of one building simultaneously. In our work, building models are reconstructed from predefined parametric (roof) primitives. We first use a well-designed deep neural network to segment and identify primitives in the given building point clouds. A holistic optimization strategy is then introduced to simultaneously determine the parameters of a segmented primitive. In the last step, the optimal parameters are used to generate a watertight building model in CityGML format. The airborne LiDAR dataset RoofN3D with predefined roof types is used for our test. It is shown that PointNet++ applied to the entire dataset can achieve an accuracy of 83% for primitive classification. For a subset of 910 buildings in RoofN3D, the holistic approach is then used to determine the parameters of primitives and reconstruct the buildings. The achieved overall quality of reconstruction is 0.08 meters for point-surface-distance or 0.7 times RMSE of the input LiDAR points. This study demonstrates the efficiency and capability of the proposed approach and its potential to handle large scale urban point clouds.

scholarly journals Integrating Airborne LiDAR and Optical Data to Estimate Forest Aboveground Biomass in Arid and Semi-Arid Regions of China

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 532 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luodan Cao ◽  
Jianjun Pan ◽  
Ruijuan Li ◽  
Jialin Li ◽  
Zhaofu Li
Keyword(s):  
Aboveground Biomass ◽  
Arid Regions ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Optical Data ◽  
Semi Arid ◽  
Forest Aboveground Biomass

scholarly journals Carbon stock in forest aboveground biomass – comparison based on Landsat data

2017 ◽  
Vol 63 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 126-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vilém Pechanec ◽  
Filip Stržínek ◽  
Jan Purkyt ◽  
Lenka Štěrbová ◽  
Pavel Cudlín
Keyword(s):  
Czech Republic ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Aboveground Biomass ◽  
Carbon Stock ◽  
Landsat Data ◽  
Forest Stands ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Aboveground Carbon ◽  
Landsat 7 ◽  
Forest Aboveground Biomass

AbstractThe objective of this study was to verify a possibility of the assessment of carbon stock above all in forest aboveground biomass in the area of Czech Republic based on Landsat data and terrestrial mapping of land cover. Landsat 7 ETM+ data and method based on vegetation index ND45 were used. Simultaneously the aboveground carbon stock was assessed by expert based estimations of carbon in aboveground biomass in the various classes of landscape cover, derived from Corine Land Cover 2012 data. By comparison of results obtaining by both methods for the whole investigated area in the Czech Republic the differences reached only 4.68% and for forest stands 7.19%. The results of aboveground carbon stock based on the Landsat 7 ETM+ data did not differ distinctly from the assessment of carbon stock for individual classes of land cover for both vegetation cover of the Czech Republic and forest stands.

scholarly journals Single-Stage Adaptive Multi-Scale Point Cloud Noise Filtering Algorithm Based on Feature Information

2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 367
Author(s):  
Zhen Zheng ◽  
Bingting Zha ◽  
Yu Zhou ◽  
Jinbo Huang ◽  
Youshi Xuchen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Point Cloud ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Single Stage ◽  
Estimation Methods ◽  
Computational Time ◽  
Noise Filtering ◽  
Filtering Algorithm ◽  
Multi Scale ◽  
Feature Information

This paper proposes a single-stage adaptive multi-scale noise filtering algorithm for point clouds, based on feature information, which aims to mitigate the fact that the current laser point cloud noise filtering algorithm has difficulty quickly completing the single-stage adaptive filtering of multi-scale noise. The feature information from each point of the point cloud is obtained based on the efficient k-dimensional (k-d) tree data structure and amended normal vector estimation methods, and the adaptive threshold is used to divide the point cloud into large-scale noise, a feature-rich region, and a flat region to reduce the computational time. The large-scale noise is removed directly, the feature-rich and flat regions are filtered via improved bilateral filtering algorithm and weighted average filtering algorithm based on grey relational analysis, respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than the state-of-art comparison algorithms. It was, thus, verified that the algorithm proposed in this paper can quickly and adaptively (i) filter out large-scale noise, (ii) smooth small-scale noise, and (iii) effectively maintain the geometric features of the point cloud. The developed algorithm provides research thought for filtering pre-processing methods applicable in 3D measurements, remote sensing, and target recognition based on point clouds.

scholarly journals 3D Ocean Water Wave Surface Analysis on Airborne LiDAR Bathymetric Point Clouds

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (19) ◽  
pp. 3918
Author(s):  
Sajjad Roshandel ◽  
Weiquan Liu ◽  
Cheng Wang ◽  
Jonathan Li
Keyword(s):  
Water Wave ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Spatial Clustering ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Coastal Hazards ◽  
Ocean Water ◽  
Coastal Zones ◽  
Wave Surface ◽  
Dbscan Clustering

Water wave monitoring is a vital issue for coastal research and plays a key role in geomorphological changes, erosion and sediment transportation, coastal hazards, risk assessment, and decision making. However, despite missing data and the difficulty of capturing the data of nearshore fieldwork, the analysis of water wave surface parameters is still able to be discussed. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for accurate detection and analysis of water wave surface from Airborne LiDAR Bathymetry (ALB) large-scale point clouds data. In our proposed method we combined the modified Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) clustering method with a connectivity constraint and a multi-level analysis of ocean water surface. We adapted for most types of wave shape anatomies in shallow waters, nearshore, and onshore of the coastal zone. We used a wavelet analysis filter to detect the water wave surface. Then, through the Fourier Transformation Approach, we estimated the parameters of wave height, wavelength, and wave orientation. The comparison between the LiDAR measure estimation technique and available buoy data was then presented. We quantified the performance of the algorithm by measuring the precision and recall for the waves identification without evaluating the degree of over-segmentation. The proposed method achieves 87% accuracy of wave identification in the shallow water of coastal zones.

scholarly journals IMAGE TO POINT CLOUD TRANSLATION USING CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK FOR AIRBORNE LIDAR DATA

2021 ◽  
Vol V-2-2021 ◽  
pp. 169-174
Author(s):  
T. Shinohara ◽  
H. Xiu ◽  
M. Matsuoka
Keyword(s):  
Point Cloud ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Real Point ◽  
3D Point Cloud ◽  
Generative Adversarial Network ◽  
Adversarial Network ◽  
3D Point Clouds ◽  
Latent Features

Abstract. This study introduces a novel image to a 3D point-cloud translation method with a conditional generative adversarial network that creates a large-scale 3D point cloud. This can generate supervised point clouds observed via airborne LiDAR from aerial images. The network is composed of an encoder to produce latent features of input images, generator to translate latent features to fake point clouds, and discriminator to classify false or real point clouds. The encoder is a pre-trained ResNet; to overcome the difficulty of generating 3D point clouds in an outdoor scene, we use a FoldingNet with features from ResNet. After a fixed number of iterations, our generator can produce fake point clouds that correspond to the input image. Experimental results show that our network can learn and generate certain point clouds using the data from the 2018 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest.

scholarly journals Stratification-Based Forest Aboveground Biomass Estimation in a Subtropical Region Using Airborne Lidar Data

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 1101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiandie Jiang ◽  
Guiying Li ◽  
Dengsheng Lu ◽  
Erxue Chen ◽  
Xinliang Wei
Keyword(s):  
Aboveground Biomass ◽  
Forest Type ◽  
Forest Stand ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Accurate Estimation ◽  
Biomass Estimation ◽  
Lidar Data ◽  
Forest Types ◽  
Estimation Model ◽  
Forest Aboveground Biomass

Species-rich subtropical forests have high carbon sequestration capacity and play important roles in regional and global carbon regulation and climate changes. A timely investigation of the spatial distribution characteristics of subtropical forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is essential to assess forest carbon stocks. Lidar (light detection and ranging) is regarded as the most reliable data source for accurate estimation of forest AGB. However, previous studies that have used lidar data have often beenbased on a single model developed from the relationships between lidar-derived variables and AGB, ignoring the variability of this relationship in different forest types. Although stratification of forest types has been proven to be effective for improving AGB estimation, how to stratify forest types and how many strata to use are still unclear. This research aims to improve forest AGB estimation through exploring suitable stratification approaches based on lidar and field survey data. Different stratification schemes including non-stratification and stratifications based on forest types and forest stand structures were examined. The AGB estimation models were developed using linear regression (LR) and random forest (RF) approaches. The results indicate the following: (1) Proper stratifications improved AGB estimation and reduced the effect of under- and overestimation problems; (2) the finer forest type strata generated higher accuracy of AGB estimation but required many more sample plots, which were often unavailable; (3) AGB estimation based on stratification of forest stand structures was similar to that based on five forest types, implying that proper stratification reduces the number of sample plots needed; (4) the optimal AGB estimation model and stratification scheme varied, depending on forest types; and (5) the RF algorithm provided better AGB estimation for non-stratification than the LR algorithm, but the LR approach provided better estimation with stratification. Results from this research provide new insights on how to properly conduct forest stratification for AGB estimation modeling, which is especially valuable in tropical and subtropical regions with complex forest types.

scholarly journals OBJECT BASED IMAGE ANALYSIS COMBINING HIGH SPATIAL RESOLUTION IMAGERY AND LASER POINT CLOUDS FOR URBAN LAND COVER

2016 ◽  
Vol XLI-B3 ◽  
pp. 733-739 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoliang Zou ◽  
Guihua Zhao ◽  
Jonathan Li ◽  
Yuanxi Yang ◽  
Yong Fang
Keyword(s):  
Land Cover ◽  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
High Spatial Resolution ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Urban Land ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Image Objects ◽  
Urban Land Cover ◽  
High Resolution Imagery ◽  
High Spatial Resolution Imagery

With the rapid developments of the sensor technology, high spatial resolution imagery and airborne Lidar point clouds can be captured nowadays, which make classification, extraction, evaluation and analysis of a broad range of object features available. High resolution imagery, Lidar dataset and parcel map can be widely used for classification as information carriers. Therefore, refinement of objects classification is made possible for the urban land cover. The paper presents an approach to object based image analysis (OBIA) combing high spatial resolution imagery and airborne Lidar point clouds. The advanced workflow for urban land cover is designed with four components. Firstly, colour-infrared TrueOrtho photo and laser point clouds were pre-processed to derive the parcel map of water bodies and nDSM respectively. Secondly, image objects are created via multi-resolution image segmentation integrating scale parameter, the colour and shape properties with compactness criterion. Image can be subdivided into separate object regions. Thirdly, image objects classification is performed on the basis of segmentation and a rule set of knowledge decision tree. These objects imagery are classified into six classes such as water bodies, low vegetation/grass, tree, low building, high building and road. Finally, in order to assess the validity of the classification results for six classes, accuracy assessment is performed through comparing randomly distributed reference points of TrueOrtho imagery with the classification results, forming the confusion matrix and calculating overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient. The study area focuses on test site Vaihingen/Enz and a patch of test datasets comes from the benchmark of ISPRS WG III/4 test project. The classification results show higher overall accuracy for most types of urban land cover. Overall accuracy is 89.5% and Kappa coefficient equals to 0.865. The OBIA approach provides an effective and convenient way to combine high resolution imagery and Lidar ancillary data for classification of urban land cover.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document