Predicting forest strata from point clouds using geometric deep learning

Sammanfattning: Introduction: Number of strata (NoS) is an informative descriptor of forest structure and is therefore useful in forest management. Collection of NoS as well as other forest properties is performed by fieldworkers and could benefit from automation. Objectives: This study investigates automated prediction of NoS from airborne laser scanned point clouds over Swedish forest plots.Methods: A previously suggested approach of using vertical gap probability is compared through experimentation against the geometric neural network PointNet++ configured for ordinal prediction. For both approaches, the mean accuracy is measured for three datasets: coniferous forest, deciduous forest, and a combination of all forests. Results: PointNet++ displayed a better point performance for two out of three datasets, attaining a top mean accuracy of 46.2%. However only the coniferous subset displayed a statistically significant superiority for PointNet++. Conclusion: This study demonstrates the potential of geometric neural networks for data mining of forest properties. The results show that impediments in the data may need to be addressed for further improvements.