Extraction of Trees Stem Diameters at Breast Height by Terrestrial Laser Sensor for Selective Cutting

In order to assist the operators of the logging harvester automatically and quickly select the appropriate trees for selective cutting, using two-dimensional laser scanner and inertial measurement system, the two-dimensional cloud points of the trunks at breast-height are obtained for several trees. After projection, clustering, linear transformation and fitting for the point clouds data, the parameters of the breast-height- diameters and center locations of the trees are obtained. The calculation is implemented in MATLAB by Polak- Ribiere-Polyak (PRP) conjugate gradient algorithm and the result is shown in VC++ environment. Using this method, absolute errors of the breast-height-diameters and center locations are 2.3 cm and (12.4, 11.4) cm respectively, and meet the requirements on the automatically selective cutting of the logging harvester. Copyright © 2014 IFSA Publishing, S. L.