ACCURATE CALCULATION OF TREE STEM TRAITS IN FORESTS BY LOCAL CORRECTION OF POINT CLOUD REGISTRATION

Abstract. In recent years, it has become important in forestry and forest research to accurately calculate tree stem traits from point clouds captured using the terrestrial laser scanner. However, it is difficult to accurately align a large number of trees in a forest over a large area. Therefore, the reliability of traits calculated from point clouds has been problematic. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically correct misaligned point-clouds and calculate accurate tree stem traits. In our method, a different registration matrix is calculated for each tree to correct the misalignment. When the target tree is specified, point-clouds measured in the vicinity of the target tree and points of the neighbor trees are selected for multi-view registration, and a registration matrix suitable for the target tree is calculated. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective in correcting misalignment and precisely calculating tree stem traits.