Volumetric forest structure reconstruction from full-waveform airborne laser scanner data

• Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Hans-Gerd Maas
• Fachliche Zuordnung: Geodäsie, Photogrammetrie, Fernerkundung, Geoinformatik, Kartographie
• Förderung: Förderung von 2012 bis 2017
• Projektkennung: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 228938047

Airborne laser scanning has become a very popular tool for the efficient and precise acquisition of forest inventory related data during the past 10-15 years. Recently, operational full-waveform laser scanner systems have become commercially available, delivering a time-resolved digitization of each laser scanner pulse rather than only measuring the first and last pulse echo. In addition to the digital terrain model and the digital crown height model obtained from conventional laser scanner data, these waveforms contain very valuable information about the vertical vegetation structure and density. The central goal of the project is to develop methods for generating volumetric forest stand representations of high geometric and radiometric quality from full-waveform airborne laser scanner data. This requires a series of geometric and radiometric transformations of the data into a voxel structure as well as the development of models to describe the interaction of laser pulses with pulse reflecting matter. We expect that these volumetric representations will facilitate the determination of parameters which could so far hardly be extracted from airborne laser scanner data, such as crown density, open stem area and the density of understorey vegetation. Applying 3D segmentation and single tree delineation techniques to multi-temporal data, biomass and biomass changes can be determined at high accuracy.

• DFG-Verfahren: Sachbeihilfen