Automated Low-cost Terrestrial Laser Scanner for Measuring Diameters at Breast Height and Heights of Forest Trees

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-cost, automated terrestrial laser scanner named BEE, designed for efficient forest inventory measurements, demonstrating high accuracy in estimating tree diameters, heights, and positions in a forest setting.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel low-cost, automated 3D laser scanner specifically designed for forest inventory, integrating hardware and software for accurate tree measurements.

Findings

Tree stem detection rate of 92.75%

Root mean square error of DBH estimation is 1.27cm

Root mean square error of tree height estimation is 0.24m

Abstract

Terrestrial laser scanner is a kind of fast, high-precision data acquisition device, which had been more and more applied to the research areas of forest inventory. In this study, a kind of automated low-cost terrestrial laser scanner was designed and implemented based on a two-dimensional laser radar sensor SICK LMS-511 and a stepper motor. The new scanner was named as BEE, which can scan the forest trees in three dimension. The BEE scanner and its supporting software are specifically designed for forest inventory. The experiments have been performed by using the BEE scanner in an artificial ginkgo forest which was located in Haidian district of Beijing. Four square plots were selected to do the experiments. The BEE scanner scanned in the four plots and acquired the single scan data respectively. The DBH, tree height and tree position of trees in the four plots were estimated and analyzed. For comparison, the manual measured data was also collected in the four plots. The tree stem detection rate for all four plots was 92.75%; the root mean square error of the DBH estimation was 1.27cm; the root mean square error of the tree height estimation was 0.24m; the tree position estimation was in line with the actual position. Experimental results show that the BEE scanner can efficiently estimate the structure parameters of forest trees and has a good potential in practical application of forest inventory.