  Terrestrial laser scanner is a kind of fast, high-precision data acquisition
device, which had been more and more applied to the research areas of forest
inventory. In this study, a kind of automated low-cost terrestrial laser
scanner was designed and implemented based on a two-dimensional laser radar
sensor SICK LMS-511 and a stepper motor. The new scanner was named as BEE,
which can scan the forest trees in three dimension. The BEE scanner and its
supporting software are specifically designed for forest inventory. The
experiments have been performed by using the BEE scanner in an artificial
ginkgo forest which was located in Haidian district of Beijing. Four square
plots were selected to do the experiments. The BEE scanner scanned in the four
plots and acquired the single scan data respectively. The DBH, tree height and
tree position of trees in the four plots were estimated and analyzed. For
comparison, the manual measured data was also collected in the four plots. The
tree stem detection rate for all four plots was 92.75%; the root mean square
error of the DBH estimation was 1.27cm; the root mean square error of the tree
height estimation was 0.24m; the tree position estimation was in line with the
actual position. Experimental results show that the BEE scanner can efficiently
estimate the structure parameters of forest trees and has a good potential in
practical application of forest inventory.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition