Development of a UAV-LiDAR System with Application to Forest Inventory
TLDR
The development of a low-cost UAV-LiDAR system and an accompanying workflow to produce 3D point clouds and a novel trajectory determination algorithm fusing observations from a GPS receiver, an Inertial Measurement Unit and a High Definition (HD) video camera are presented.Abstract:
We present the development of a low-cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Light Detecting and Ranging (UAV-LiDAR) system and an accompanying workflow to produce 3D point clouds. UAV systems provide an unrivalled combination of high temporal and spatial resolution datasets. The TerraLuma UAV-LiDAR system has been developed to take advantage of these properties and in doing so overcome some of the current limitations of the use of this technology within the forestry industry. A modified processing workflow including a novel trajectory determination algorithm fusing observations from a GPS receiver, an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and a High Definition (HD) video camera is presented. The advantages of this workflow are demonstrated using a rigorous assessment of the spatial accuracy of the final point clouds. It is shown that due to the inclusion of video the horizontal accuracy of the final point cloud improves from 0.61 m to 0.34 m (RMS error assessed against ground control). The effect of the very high density point clouds (up to 62 points per m2) produced by the UAV-LiDAR system on the measurement of tree location, height and crown width are also assessed by performing repeat surveys over individual isolated trees. The standard deviation of tree height is shown to reduce from 0.26 m, when using data with a density of 8 points perm2, to 0.15mwhen the higher density data was used. Improvements in the uncertainty of the measurement of tree location, 0.80 m to 0.53 m, and crown width, 0.69 m to 0.61 m are also shown.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles will revolutionize spatial ecology
Karen Anderson,Kevin J. Gaston +1 more
TL;DR: Improvements in UAV platform design have been accompanied by improvements in navigation and the miniaturization of measurement technologies, allowing the study of individual organisms and their spatiotemporal dynamics at close range.
Journal ArticleDOI
Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for High-Resolution Reconstruction of Topography: The Structure from Motion Approach on Coastal Environments
Francesco Mancini,Marco Dubbini,Mario Gattelli,Francesco Stecchi,Stefano Fabbri,Giovanni Gabbianelli +5 more
TL;DR: The UAV-based approach to Structure from Motion approach to low-altitude aerial imageries collected by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle was demonstrated to be a straightforward one and accuracy of the vertical dataset was comparable with results obtained by TLS technology.
Journal ArticleDOI
Overview and Current Status of Remote Sensing Applications Based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)
TL;DR: An overview of different areas of remote sensing applications based on unmanned aerial platforms equipped with a set of specific sensors and instruments is presented, each independent from the others so that the reader does not need to read the full paper when a specific application is of interest.
Journal ArticleDOI
Assessment of Forest Structure Using Two UAV Techniques: A Comparison of Airborne Laser Scanning and Structure from Motion (SfM) Point Clouds
TL;DR: Although ALS is capable of providing more accurate estimates of the vertical structure of forests across the larger range of canopy densities found in this study, SfM was still found to be an adequate low-cost alternative for surveying of forest stands.
Journal ArticleDOI
High spatial resolution three-dimensional mapping of vegetation spectral dynamics using computer vision
TL;DR: In this article, the authors demonstrate a new aerial remote sensing system enabling routine and inexpensive aerial 3D measurements of canopy structure and spectral attributes, with properties similar to those of LIDAR, but with RGB (red-green-blue) spectral attributes for each point.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints
TL;DR: This paper presents a method for extracting distinctive invariant features from images that can be used to perform reliable matching between different views of an object or scene and can robustly identify objects among clutter and occlusion while achieving near real-time performance.
Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints
TL;DR: The Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (or SIFT) algorithm is a highly robust method to extract and consequently match distinctive invariant features from images that can then be used to reliably match objects in diering images.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
The unscented Kalman filter for nonlinear estimation
Eric A. Wan,R. van der Merwe +1 more
TL;DR: The unscented Kalman filter (UKF) as discussed by the authors was proposed by Julier and Uhlman (1997) for nonlinear control problems, including nonlinear system identification, training of neural networks, and dual estimation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Photo tourism: exploring photo collections in 3D
TL;DR: This work presents a system for interactively browsing and exploring large unstructured collections of photographs of a scene using a novel 3D interface that consists of an image-based modeling front end that automatically computes the viewpoint of each photograph and a sparse 3D model of the scene and image to model correspondences.
Journal ArticleDOI
An efficient solution to the five-point relative pose problem
TL;DR: The algorithm is used in a robust hypothesize-and-test framework to estimate structure and motion in real-time with low delay and is the first algorithm well-suited for numerical implementation that also corresponds to the inherent complexity of the problem.
Related Papers (5)
Unmanned aerial systems for photogrammetry and remote sensing: A review
Ismael Colomina,P. Molina +1 more
Lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles will revolutionize spatial ecology
Karen Anderson,Kevin J. Gaston +1 more