Spatial vegetation density index from terrestrial laser scanner

Abstract

International audienceForest monitoring is a key issue in scientific, social and commercial domains. Manual measurements of forests attributes can be tedious and limited, hence, Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) has been introduced in forest monitoring. Vegetation density index (VDI) is a way to quantify vegetation using voxels from TLS data. The VDI is estimated using ray tracing techniques in a 3D voxel grid. This process can be time consuming. We present a continuous approach to minimise the ray tracing usage in the VDI computation