Fast registration of forest terrestrial laser scans using key points detected from crowns and stems

• Published in: International journal of digital earth Vol. 13; no. 12; pp. 1585 - 1603
• Main Authors: Dai, Wenxia, Yang, Bisheng, Liang, Xinlian, Dong, Zhen, Huang, Ronggang, Wang, Yunsheng, Pyörälä, Jiri, Kukko, Antero
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Taylor & Francis 01.12.2020; Taylor & Francis Ltd; Taylor & Francis Group
• Subjects: area; data collection; Errors; Finland; forest; Forest management; Lasers; Occlusion; point clouds; Registration; Rotation; Stems; Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS); testing; Translation; tropical montane cloud forests; Finland
• ISSN: 1753-8947; 1753-8955; 1753-8955
• DOI: 10.1080/17538947.2020.1764118

Registration of TLS data is an important prerequisite to overcome the limitations of occlusion. Most existing registration methods rely on stems to determine the transformation parameters. However, the complexity of the registration problem increases dramatically as the number of stems grows. It is tricky to reduce the stems and determine the valid ones that can provide reliable registration transformation without a knowledge of the two scans. This paper presents an automatic and fast registration of TLS point clouds in forest areas. It reduces stems by selecting from the overlap areas, which are recovered from the mode-based key points that are detected from crowns. The proposed method was tested in a managed forest in Finland, and was compared with the stem-based registration method without reducing stems. The experiments demonstrated that the mean rotation error was 2.09′, and the mean errors in horizontal and vertical translation were 1.13 and 7.21 cm, respectively. Compared with the stem-based method, the proposed method improves the registration efficiency significantly (818 s vs 96 s) and achieves similar results in terms of the mean registration errors (1.94′ for rotation error, 0.83 and 7.38 cm for horizontal and vertical translation error, respectively).