Deep learning based 3D point cloud regression for estimating forest biomass

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Knowledge of forest biomass stocks and their development is important for implementing effective climate change mitigation measures. Remote sensing using airborne LiDAR can be used to measure vegetation structure at large scale. We present deep learning systems for predicting wood volume, above-ground biomass (AGB), and subsequently above-ground carbon stocks directly from airborne LiDAR point clouds. Specifically, we devise different neural network architectures for point cloud regression and evaluate them on remote sensing data of areas for which AGB estimates have been obtained from field measurements in a national forest inventory. Our adaptation of Minkowski convolutional neural networks for regression gave the best results. The deep neural networks produced significantly more accurate wood volume, AGB, and carbon estimates compared to state-of-the-art approaches operating on basic statistics of the point clouds. In contrast to other methods, no digital terrain model is required. We expect this finding to have a strong impact on LiDAR-based analyses of terrestrial ecosystem dynamics.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication30th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2022
EditorsMatthias Renz, Mohamed Sarwat, Mario A. Nascimento, Shashi Shekhar, Xing Xie
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc.
Publication date1 Nov 2022
Pages1-4
Article number38
ISBN (Electronic)9781450395298
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2022
Event30th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, SIGSPATIAL GIS 2022 - Seattle, United States
Duration: 1 Nov 20224 Nov 2022

Conference

Conference30th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, SIGSPATIAL GIS 2022
LandUnited States
BySeattle
Periode01/11/202204/11/2022
SponsorApple, Esri, Google, Oracle, Wherobots

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Owner/Author.

    Research areas

  • biomass, climate change, datasets, LiDAR, neural networks

Links

ID: 337982106