NeRF-Accelerated Ecological Monitoring in Mixed-Evergreen Redwood Forest

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Korycki, Adam, Yeaton, Cory, Gilbert, Gregory S., Josephson, Colleen, McGuire, Steve
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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_version_ 1866913541596905472
author Korycki, Adam
Yeaton, Cory
Gilbert, Gregory S.
Josephson, Colleen
McGuire, Steve
author_facet Korycki, Adam
Yeaton, Cory
Gilbert, Gregory S.
Josephson, Colleen
McGuire, Steve
contents Forest mapping provides critical observational data needed to understand the dynamics of forest environments. Notably, tree diameter at breast height (DBH) is a metric used to estimate forest biomass and carbon dioxide sequestration. Manual methods of forest mapping are labor intensive and time consuming, a bottleneck for large-scale mapping efforts. Automated mapping relies on acquiring dense forest reconstructions, typically in the form of point clouds. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and mobile laser scanning (MLS) generate point clouds using expensive LiDAR sensing, and have been used successfully to estimate tree diameter. Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) are an emergent technology enabling photorealistic, vision-based reconstruction by training a neural network on a sparse set of input views. In this paper, we present a comparison of MLS and NeRF forest reconstructions for the purpose of trunk diameter estimation in a mixed-evergreen Redwood forest. In addition, we propose an improved DBH-estimation method using convex-hull modeling. Using this approach, we achieved 1.68 cm RMSE, which consistently outperformed standard cylinder modeling approaches. Our code contributions and forest datasets are freely available at https://github.com/harelab-ucsc/RedwoodNeRF.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_07418
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NeRF-Accelerated Ecological Monitoring in Mixed-Evergreen Redwood Forest
Korycki, Adam
Yeaton, Cory
Gilbert, Gregory S.
Josephson, Colleen
McGuire, Steve
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
Forest mapping provides critical observational data needed to understand the dynamics of forest environments. Notably, tree diameter at breast height (DBH) is a metric used to estimate forest biomass and carbon dioxide sequestration. Manual methods of forest mapping are labor intensive and time consuming, a bottleneck for large-scale mapping efforts. Automated mapping relies on acquiring dense forest reconstructions, typically in the form of point clouds. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and mobile laser scanning (MLS) generate point clouds using expensive LiDAR sensing, and have been used successfully to estimate tree diameter. Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) are an emergent technology enabling photorealistic, vision-based reconstruction by training a neural network on a sparse set of input views. In this paper, we present a comparison of MLS and NeRF forest reconstructions for the purpose of trunk diameter estimation in a mixed-evergreen Redwood forest. In addition, we propose an improved DBH-estimation method using convex-hull modeling. Using this approach, we achieved 1.68 cm RMSE, which consistently outperformed standard cylinder modeling approaches. Our code contributions and forest datasets are freely available at https://github.com/harelab-ucsc/RedwoodNeRF.
title NeRF-Accelerated Ecological Monitoring in Mixed-Evergreen Redwood Forest
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07418