scholarly journals A Review of Tree Species Classification Based on Airborne LiDAR Data and Applied Classifiers

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 353
Author(s):  
Maja Michałowska ◽  
Jacek Rapiński
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Tree Species ◽  
Laser Scanning ◽  
Discrimination Performance ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Species Discrimination ◽  
Species Classification ◽  
Waveform Data

Remote sensing techniques, developed over the past four decades, have enabled large-scale forest inventory. Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), as an active remote sensing technology, allows for the acquisition of three-dimensional point clouds of scanned areas, as well as a range of features allowing for increased performance of object extraction and classification approaches. As many publications have shown, multiple LiDAR-derived metrics, with the assistance of classification algorithms, contribute to the high accuracy of tree species discrimination based on data obtained by laser scanning. The aim of this article is to review studies in the species classification literature which used data collected by Airborne Laser Scanning. We analyzed these studies to figure out the most efficient group of LiDAR-derived features in species discrimination. We also identified the most powerful classification algorithm, which maximizes the advantages of the derived metrics to increase species discrimination performance. We conclude that features extracted from full-waveform data lead to the highest overall accuracy. Radiometric features with height information are also promising, generating high species classification accuracies. Using random forest and support vector machine as classifiers gave the best species discrimination results in the reviewed publications.

scholarly journals FEATURE RELEVANCE ASSESSMENT OF MULTISPECTRAL AIRBORNE LIDAR DATA FOR TREE SPECIES CLASSIFICATION

2018 ◽  
Vol XLII-3 ◽  
pp. 31-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Amiri ◽  
M. Heurich ◽  
P. Krzystek ◽  
A. K. Skidmore
Keyword(s):  
Tree Species ◽  
Laser Scanning ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Species Classification ◽  
Tree Species Classification ◽  
3D Point Clouds ◽  
Segmentation Approach ◽  
Species Mapping ◽  
Spectral Channels

The presented experiment investigates the potential of Multispectral Laser Scanning (MLS) point clouds for single tree species classification. The basic idea is to simulate a MLS sensor by combining two different Lidar sensors providing three different wavelngthes. The available data were acquired in the summer 2016 at the same date in a leaf-on condition with an average point density of 37&amp;thinsp;points/m<sup>2</sup>. For the purpose of classification, we segmented the combined 3D point clouds consisiting of three different spectral channels into 3D clusters using Normalized Cut segmentation approach. Then, we extracted four group of features from the 3D point cloud space. Once a varity of features has been extracted, we applied forward stepwise feature selection in order to reduce the number of irrelevant or redundant features. For the classification, we used multinomial logestic regression with <i>L<sub>1</sub></i> regularization. Our study is conducted using 586 ground measured single trees from 20 sample plots in the Bavarian Forest National Park, in Germany. Due to lack of reference data for some rare species, we focused on four classes of species. The results show an improvement between 4&amp;ndash;10&amp;thinsp;pp for the tree species classification by using MLS data in comparison to a single wavelength based approach. A cross validated (15-fold) accuracy of 0.75 can be achieved when all feature sets from three different spectral channels are used. Our results cleary indicates that the use of MLS point clouds has great potential to improve detailed forest species mapping.

scholarly journals Terrestrial Laser Scanning for Vegetation Analyses with a Special Focus on Savannas

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 507
Author(s):  
Tasiyiwa Priscilla Muumbe ◽  
Jussi Baade ◽  
Jenia Singh ◽  
Christiane Schmullius ◽  
Christian Thau
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Vegetation Structure ◽  
Laser Scanning ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Terrestrial Laser Scanning ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Parameter Extraction ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Vegetation Parameter

Savannas are heterogeneous ecosystems, composed of varied spatial combinations and proportions of woody and herbaceous vegetation. Most field-based inventory and remote sensing methods fail to account for the lower stratum vegetation (i.e., shrubs and grasses), and are thus underrepresenting the carbon storage potential of savanna ecosystems. For detailed analyses at the local scale, Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) has proven to be a promising remote sensing technology over the past decade. Accordingly, several review articles already exist on the use of TLS for characterizing 3D vegetation structure. However, a gap exists on the spatial concentrations of TLS studies according to biome for accurate vegetation structure estimation. A comprehensive review was conducted through a meta-analysis of 113 relevant research articles using 18 attributes. The review covered a range of aspects, including the global distribution of TLS studies, parameters retrieved from TLS point clouds and retrieval methods. The review also examined the relationship between the TLS retrieval method and the overall accuracy in parameter extraction. To date, TLS has mainly been used to characterize vegetation in temperate, boreal/taiga and tropical forests, with only little emphasis on savannas. TLS studies in the savanna focused on the extraction of very few vegetation parameters (e.g., DBH and height) and did not consider the shrub contribution to the overall Above Ground Biomass (AGB). Future work should therefore focus on developing new and adjusting existing algorithms for vegetation parameter extraction in the savanna biome, improving predictive AGB models through 3D reconstructions of savanna trees and shrubs as well as quantifying AGB change through the application of multi-temporal TLS. The integration of data from various sources and platforms e.g., TLS with airborne LiDAR is recommended for improved vegetation parameter extraction (including AGB) at larger spatial scales. The review highlights the huge potential of TLS for accurate savanna vegetation extraction by discussing TLS opportunities, challenges and potential future research in the savanna biome.

scholarly journals VALIDATING A WORKFLOW FOR TREE INVENTORY UPDATING WITH 3D POINT CLOUDS OBTAINED BY MOBILE LASER SCANNING

2018 ◽  
Vol XLII-2 ◽  
pp. 1163-1168
Author(s):  
J. Wang ◽  
R. Lindenbergh
Keyword(s):  
Tree Species ◽  
Laser Scanning ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Open Data ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Urban Trees ◽  
Biomass Estimation ◽  
Species Classification ◽  
3D Point Clouds ◽  
Tree Inventory

Urban trees are an important component of our environment and ecosystem. Trees are able to combat climate change, clean the air and cool the streets and city. Tree inventory and monitoring are of great interest for biomass estimation and change monitoring. Conventionally, parameters of trees are manually measured and documented in situ, which is not efficient regarding labour and costs. Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) has become a well-established surveying technique for the acquisition of geo-spatial information. Combined with automatic point cloud processing techniques, this in principle enables the efficient extraction of geometric tree parameters. In recent years, studies have investigated to what extend it is possible to perform tree inventories using laser scanning point clouds. Give the availability of a city of Delft Open data tree repository, we are now able to present, validate and extend a workflow to automatically obtain tree data from tree location until tree species. The results of a test over 47 trees show that the proposed methods in the workflow are able to individual urban trees. The tree species classification results based on the extracted tree parameters show that only one tree was wrongly classified using k-means clustering.

scholarly journals EVALUATING THE POSSIBILITY OF TREE SPECIES CLASSIFICATION WITH DUAL-WAVELENGTH ALS DATA

2019 ◽  
Vol XLII-2/W13 ◽  
pp. 1097-1103
Author(s):  
M. Pilarska ◽  
W. Ostrowski
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Data ◽  
Tree Species ◽  
Laser Scanning ◽  
Laser Scanner ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Airborne Laser Scanning ◽  
Tree Canopy ◽  
Species Classification ◽  
Airborne Laser ◽  
Simultaneous Acquisition

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Airborne laser scanning (ALS) plays an important role in spatial data acquisition. One of the advantages of this technique is laser beam penetration through vegetation, which makes it possible to not only obtain data on the tree canopy but also within and under the canopy. In recent years, multi-wavelength airborne laser scanning has been developed. This technique consists of simultaneous acquisition of point clouds in more than one band. The aim of this experiment was to examine and assess the possibilities of tree segmentation and species classification in an urban area. In this experiment, point clouds registered in two wavelengths (532 and 1064&amp;thinsp;nm) were used for tree segmentation and species classification. The data were acquired with a Riegl VQ-1560i-DW laser scanner over Elblag, Poland, during August 2018. Tree species collected by a botanist team within terrain measurements were used as a reference in the classification process. Within the experiment segmentation and classification process were performed. Regarding the segmentation, TerraScan software and Li et al.’s algorithm, implemented in LidR package were used. Results from both methods are clearly over-segmented in comparison to the manual segments. In Terrasolid segmentation, single reference segments are over-segmented in 28% of cases, whereas, for LidR, over-segmentation occurred in 73% of the segments. According the classification results, Thuja, Salix and Betula were the species, for which the highest classification accuracy was achieved.</p>

scholarly journals Tree Species Classification by Employing Multiple Features Acquired from Integrated Sensors

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guang Yang ◽  
Yaolong Zhao ◽  
Baoxin Li ◽  
Yuntao Ma ◽  
Ruren Li ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Tree Species ◽  
Vegetation Indices ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Hyperspectral Images ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Textural Features ◽  
Integrated Sensors ◽  
Species Classification ◽  
Multiple Features ◽  
Tree Species Classification

Explicit information of tree species composition provides valuable materials for the management of forests and urban greenness. In recent years, scholars have employed multiple features in tree species classification, so as to identify them from different perspectives. Most studies use different features to classify the target tree species in a specific growth environment and evaluate the classification results. However, the data matching problems have not been discussed; besides, the contributions of different features and the performance of different classifiers have not been systematically compared. Remote sensing technology of the integrated sensors helps to realize the purpose with high time efficiency and low cost. Benefiting from an integrated system which simultaneously acquired the hyperspectral images, LiDAR waveform, and point clouds, this study made a systematic research on different features and classifiers in pixel-wised tree species classification. We extracted the crown height model (CHM) from the airborne LiDAR device and multiple features from the hyperspectral images, including Gabor textural features, gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) textural features, and vegetation indices. Different experimental schemes were tested at two study areas with different numbers and configurations of tree species. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of Gabor textural features in specific tree species classification in both homogeneous and heterogeneous growing environments. The GLCM textural features did not improve the classification accuracy of tree species when being combined with spectral features. The CHM feature made more contributions to discriminating tree species than vegetation indices. Different classifiers exhibited similar performances, and support vector machine (SVM) produced the highest overall accuracy among all the classifiers.

Tropical Tree Species 3D Modelling and Classification Based on LiDAR Technology

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Panagiotis Barmpoutis ◽  
Tania Stathaki ◽  
Jonathan Lloyd ◽  
Magna Soelma Bessera de Moura
Keyword(s):  
Tree Species ◽  
Laser Scanning ◽  
Tensor Decomposition ◽  
Singular Values ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Tropical Tree ◽  
Species Classification ◽  
Tropical Tree Species ◽  
Sensing Technology ◽  
3D Information

Over the last decade or so, laser scanning technology has become an increasingly popular and important tool for forestry inventory, enabling accurate capture of 3D information in a fast and environmentally friendly manner. To this end, the authors propose here a system for tropical tree species classification based on 3D scans of LiDAR sensing technology. In order to exploit the interrelated patterns of trees, skeleton representations of tree point clouds are extracted, and their structures are divided into overlapping equal-sized 3D segments. Subsequently, they represent them as third-order sparse structure tensors setting the value of skeleton coordinates equal to one. Based on the higher-order tensor decomposition of each sparse segment, they 1) estimate the mode-n singular values extracting intra-correlations of tree branches and 2) model tropical trees as linear dynamical systems extracting appearance information and dynamics. The proposed methodology was evaluated in tropical tree species and specifically in a dataset consisting of 26 point clouds of common Caatinga dry-forest trees.

Development on Filtering Algorithms of Airborne LiDAR Point Clouds

2012 ◽  
Vol 226-228 ◽  
pp. 1892-1898
Author(s):  
Jian Qing Shi ◽  
Ting Chen Jiang ◽  
Ming Lian Jiao
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Laser Scanning ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Filtering Algorithms ◽  
Filtering Algorithm ◽  
Digital Elevation ◽  
City Model ◽  
Elevation Model

Airborne LiDAR is a new kind of surveying technology of remote sensing which developed rapidly during recent years. Raw laser scanning point clouds data include terrain points, building points, vegetation points, outlier points, etc.. In order to generate digital elevation model (DEM) and three-dimensional city model,these point clouds data must be filtered. Mathematical morphology based filtering algorithm, slope based filtering algorithm, TIN based filtering algorithm, moving surface based filtering algorithm, scanning lines based filtering algorithm and so on several representative filtering algorithms for LiDAR point clouds data have been introduced and discussed and contrasted in this paper. Based on these algorithms summarize the studying progresss about the filtering algorithm of airborne LiDAR point clouds data in home and abroad. In the end, the paper gives an expectation which will provides a reference for the following relative study.

scholarly journals Mapping Individual Tree Species and Vitality along Urban Road Corridors with LiDAR and Imaging Sensors: Point Density versus View Perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 1403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianwei Wu ◽  
Wei Yao ◽  
Przemyslaw Polewski
Keyword(s):  
Tree Species ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Laser Scanning ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Scanning System ◽  
Urban Road ◽  
Road Corridors ◽  
Laser Scanning System

To meet a growing demand for accurate high-fidelity vegetation cover mapping in urban areas toward biodiversity conservation and assessing the impact of climate change, this paper proposes a complete approach to species and vitality classification at single tree level by synergistic use of multimodality 3D remote sensing data. So far, airborne laser scanning system(ALS or airborne LiDAR) has shown promising results in tree cover mapping for urban areas. This paper analyzes the potential of mobile laser scanning system/mobile mapping system (MLS/MMS)-based methods for recognition of urban plant species and characterization of growth conditions using ultra-dense LiDAR point clouds and provides an objective comparison with the ALS-based methods. Firstly, to solve the extremely intensive computational burden caused by the classification of ultra-dense MLS data, a new method for the semantic labeling of LiDAR data in the urban road environment is developed based on combining a conditional random field (CRF) for the context-based classification of 3D point clouds with shape priors. These priors encode geometric primitives found in the scene through sample consensus segmentation. Then, single trees are segmented from the labelled tree points using the 3D graph cuts algorithm. Multinomial logistic regression classifiers are used to determine the fine deciduous urban tree species of conversation concern and their growth vitality. Finally, the weight-of-evidence (WofE) based decision fusion method is applied to combine the probability outputs of classification results from the MLS and ALS data. The experiment results obtained in city road corridors demonstrated that point cloud data acquired from the airborne platform achieved even slightly better results in terms of tree detection rate, tree species and vitality classification accuracy, although the tree vitality distribution in the test site is less balanced compared to the species distribution. When combined with MLS data, overall accuracies of 78% and 74% for tree species and vitality classification can be achieved, which has improved by 5.7% and 4.64% respectively compared to the usage of airborne data only.

scholarly journals Predicting Tree Species From 3D Laser Scanning Point Clouds Using Deep Learning

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominik Seidel ◽  
Peter Annighöfer ◽  
Anton Thielman ◽  
Quentin Edward Seifert ◽  
Jan-Henrik Thauer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Tree Species ◽  
Classification Accuracy ◽  
Laser Scanning ◽  
Confusion Matrix ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Small Sample ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Computationally Efficient ◽  
Species Classification ◽  
3D Point Clouds

Automated species classification from 3D point clouds is still a challenge. It is, however, an important task for laser scanning-based forest inventory, ecosystem models, and to support forest management. Here, we tested the performance of an image classification approach based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with the aim to classify 3D point clouds of seven tree species based on 2D representation in a computationally efficient way. We were particularly interested in how the approach would perform with artificially increased training data size based on image augmentation techniques. Our approach yielded a high classification accuracy (86%) and the confusion matrix revealed that despite rather small sample sizes of the training data for some tree species, classification accuracy was high. We could partly relate this to the successful application of the image augmentation technique, improving our result by 6% in total and 13, 14, and 24% for ash, oak and pine, respectively. The introduced approach is hence not only applicable to small-sized datasets, it is also computationally effective since it relies on 2D instead of 3D data to be processed in the CNN. Our approach was faster and more accurate when compared to the point cloud-based “PointNet” approach.

scholarly journals MODELLING MEAN ALBEDO OF INDIVIDUAL ROOFS IN COMPLEX URBAN AREAS USING SATELLITE IMAGES AND AIRBORNE LASER SCANNING POINT CLOUDS

2017 ◽  
Vol XLII-2/W7 ◽  
pp. 237-240
Author(s):  
B. Kalantar ◽  
S. Mansor ◽  
Z. Khuzaimah ◽  
M. Ibrahim Sameen ◽  
B. Pradhan
Keyword(s):  
Laser Scanning ◽  
Surface Albedo ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Airborne Lidar ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Svm Classifier ◽  
Lidar Data ◽  
Landsat 8 ◽  
Airborne Lidar Data ◽  
Roofing Materials

Knowledge of surface albedo at individual roof scale is important for mitigating urban heat islands and understanding urban climate change. This study presents a method for quantifying surface albedo of individual roofs in a complex urban area using the integration of Landsat 8 and airborne LiDAR data. First, individual roofs were extracted from airborne LiDAR data and orthophotos using optimized segmentation and supervised object based image analysis (OBIA). Support vector machine (SVM) was used as a classifier in OBIA process for extracting individual roofs. The user-defined parameters required in SVM classifier were selected using v-fold cross validation method. After that, surface albedo was calculated for each individual roof from Landsat images. Finally, thematic maps of mean surface albedo of individual roofs were generated in GIS and the results were discussed. Results showed that the study area is covered by 35% of buildings varying in roofing material types and conditions. The calculated surface albedo of buildings ranged from 0.16 to 0.65 in the study area. More importantly, the results indicated that the types and conditions of roofing materials significantly effect on the mean value of surface albedo. Mean albedo of new concrete, old concrete, new steel, and old steel were found to be equal to 0.38, 0.26, 0.51, and 0.44 respectively. Replacing old roofing materials with new ones should highly prioritized.

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