Automated Uav Lidar strip alignment in forested areas using density-based canopy clustering

Abstract

Recently, LiDAR point cloud data acquired by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are used in many scientific disciplines and like the former photogrammetric techniques these data are usually collected in overlapping strips. Generation of comprehensive models of the scanned areas requires these strips to be aligned together which is a challenging process due to the multi sensor scanning system including the scanning sensor, the GNSS receiver and the IMU sensor. The main errors result from the inaccurate GNSS locations and flight path shifts as well as failure of the GNSS signals in complex urban or forest environments. For that reasons, the development of an automatic feature-dependant method in urban areas or individual tree-based in forest areas where there are no distinct features for strip adjustment in these environments become a must. This research work focuses on automated co-registration/alignment multiple point cloud strips of forested areas acquired from UAV LiDAR (or referred to as ULS) lack of artificial ground control. The main limitations of ULS data of forests are the relatively low sampling density of near ground areas and stem nullity due to the top-view scanning mode of ULS. To obviate this, this work explicates the tree crowns shape to identify the key points required for co-registration by applying a density based clustering algorithm (DBSCAN) to the tree crowns and models resulting clusters with Gaussian mixture models by learning the best parameters using maximum likelihood estimation to define the key points. A feature vector is assigned to each point by quantifying its angular and linear relationship with respect to the local system origin. Next, the similarity score matrix is computed by a fixed geometric relationship between the distance and angle similarity. Then, the maximum weight matching problem is solved for the similarity score to gain point-to-point correspondence. Finally, the optimal 2D rigid transformation parameters (one rotation and two translations without scale factor ) are obtained using permutations to try out for all possible paired combinations and count the number of inlier points satisfying a tolerance of planimetric deviation after alignment within a user defined threshold. The results of two test forest plots with different tree species and ULS point densities show a mean planimetric enhancement from 1.79 m to 0.22 ± 0.13 m for plot one and from 2.33 ± 0.53 m to 0.61 ± 0.21 m.