Airborne LiDAR is fast becoming an innovation for forest inventory. It aids in obtaining forest characteristics in areas or cases where actual field inventory would be very tedious. This study aims to estimate diameter at breast height (DBH) using airborne LiDAR point-cloud parameters with Worldview-2 satellite images, and to validate these with actual measurements done in the field. The study site is a field plot with forest inventory at Mt. Makiling, Laguna, Philippines that was surveyed into 20m, 10m and 5m subplots or grids. The estimation of DBH was carried out by extracting the said parameters from the LiDAR point-cloud, and extracting different bands from the Worldview image and performing linear and log-linear regression of these values. The regressions were done in four different cases, namely: LiDAR parameters without intensity (case1), LiDAR parameters without intensity with Worldview bands (case 2), intensity of LiDAR points (case 3), and LiDAR parameters with intensity and Worldview bands (case 4). From these it was found that the best case for estimating DBH is with the use of LiDAR parameters with intensity and Worldview bands in a 10x10 grid, in Log-Linear regression with a root mean squared error of 1.96 cm and an adjusted R² value of 0.65. This was further improved through stepwise regression, and adjusted R² value was 0.71.

Date Published: 9 June 2016
PDF: 13 pages
Proc. SPIE 9879, Lidar Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring XV, 98791C (9 June 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2223694

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9879:
Lidar Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring XV
Upendra N. Singh; Nobuo Sugimoto; Achuthan Jayaraman; Mullapudi V. R. Seshasai, Editor(s)