Estimation of Tree Stem Attributes Using Terrestrial Photogrammetry with a Camera Rig

By Mona Forsman, N. Börlin, Johan Holmgren. 2016

85 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose a novel photogrammetric method for field plot inventory, designed for simplicity and time efficiency on-site. A prototype multi-camera rig was used to acquire images from field plot centers in multiple directions. The acquisition time on-site was less than two minutes. From each view, a point cloud was generated using a novel, rig-based matching of detected SIFT keypoints. Stems were detected in the merged point cloud, and their positions and diameters were estimated. The method was evaluated on 25 hemi-boreal forest plots of a 10-m radius. Due to difficult lighting conditions and faulty hardware, imagery from only six field plots was processed. The method performed best on three plots with clearly visible stems with a 76% detection rate and 0% commission. Diameters could be estimated for 40% of the stems with an RMSE of 2.8–9.5 cm. The results are comparable to other camera-based methods evaluated in a similar manner. The results are inferior to TLS-based methods. However, our method is easily extended to multiple station image schemas, something that could significantly improve the results while retaining low commission errors and time on-site. Furthermore, with smaller hardware, we believe this could be a useful technique for measuring stem attributes in the forest.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Geology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/489a1af3388e3633e814bf3a2df21b86abeaed28

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In Environmental Engineering

In Geology

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

International benchmarking of terrestrial laser scanning approaches for forest inventories (2018, background): “Recently, similar point clouds have been available from the structure-from-motion, structured-light and mobile laser scanning, e.g., (Liang et al., 2014a, 2015; Forsman et al., 2016a, 2016b; Hyyppä et al., 2017; Tomaštík et al., 2017; Mokroš et al., 2018).”
High Precision Individual Tree Diameter and Perimeter Estimation from Close-Range Photogrammetry (2018, methodology): “During the last two decades, development methods have rendered 3D point clouds as a useful data source for tree measurements [2].”