DEVELOPMENT OF A LASER SCANNER FOR MEASURING TREE CANOPY CHARACTERISTICS: PHASE 1. PROTOTYPE DEVELOPMENT

摘要

Automatically measuring canopy characteristics is an essential step for tree-specific management of a grove. A laser scanning system and corresponding algorithms were developed for potential use in measurement of tree canopy height, width, and volume. Tests with fixed-length PVC pipes demonstrated that the system had accuracies of 97% for length measurements in three perpendicular directions with coefficients of variation (CV) less than 4%. Volume measurement of a rectangular box gave a CV of 5.4% and a relative error of 4.4%. Spatial resolution of the system was estimated to be smaller than 6.0 cm (horizontal) × 1.9 cm (vertical) for potential field applications