Korean Journal of Remote Sensing (대한원격탐사학회지)

Korean Society of Remote Sensing (대한원격탐사학회)
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Current Status of Tree Height Estimation from Airborne LiDAR Data

  • Received : 2011.05.03
  • Accepted : 2011.05.27
  • Published : 2011.06.30
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Abstract

Most nations around the world have expressed significant concern in the climate change due to a rapid increase in green-house gases and thus reach an international agreement to control total amount of these gases for the mitigation of global warming. As the most important absorber of carbon dioxide, one of major green-house gases, forest resources should be more tightly managed with a means to measure their total amount, forest biomass, efficiently and accurately. Forest biomass has close relations with forest areas and tree height. Airborne LiDAR data helps extract biophysical properties on forest resources such as tree height more efficiently by providing detailed spatial information about the wide-range ground surface. Many researchers have thus developed various methods to estimate tree height using LiDAR data, which retain different performance and characteristics depending on forest environment and data characteristics. In this study, we attempted to investigate such various techniques to estimate tree height, elaborate their advantages and limitations, and suggest future research directions. We first examined the characteristics of LiDAR data applied to forest studies and then analyzed methods on filtering, a precedent procedure for tree height estimation. Regarding the methods for tree height estimation, we classified them into two categories: individual tree-based and regression-based method and described the representative methods under each category with a summary of their analysis results. Finally, we reviewed techniques regarding data fusion between LiDAR and other remote sensing data for future work.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

Supported by : NRF

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