The original data (emulated HHDCs) presented in the study entitled "Generative Diffusion Models for Compressed Sensing of Satellite LiDAR Data: Evaluating Image Quality Metrics in Forest Landscape Reconstruction"

The dataset contains four subsets of original data (emulated HHDCs) presented in the study entitled "Generative Diffusion Models for Compressed Sensing of Satellite LiDAR Data: Evaluating Image Quality Metrics in Forest Landscape Reconstruction" submitted to the journal "Remote Sensing".
The raw LiDAR data, being the source for the emulated HHDCs, centered on the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in the state of Maryland (Latitude 38.88° N, Longitude 76.56° W) are available at NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network) website: Discrete return LiDAR point cloud (DP1.30003.001), RELEASE-2024. https://doi.org/10.48443/hj77-kf64.
A dataset of emulated HHDCs was created using high-resolution point clouds from the SERC region. The input low-resolution HHDC footprints were modeled with a uniform diameter of 10 meters, spaced 3 meters apart along the swath and 6 meters across the swath, with a vertical resolution of 0.5 meters (these values were chosen to match the LiDAR instrument currently under development as part of NASA’s CASALS project). These HHDCs were standardized to a fixed size of 16 × 32 × 128 (footprints across the swath × footprints along the swath × height), corresponding to a forest tile covering 96 × 96 meters with a height of 64 meters. For super-resolution to 3 meters, the high-resolution output HHDC footprints were designed to increase the resolution while maintaining the same coverage area. Specifically, the footprints were assigned a radius of 3 meters, with a 3-meter separation both along and across the swath, and a vertical resolution of 0.5 meters. This configuration resulted in a tensor size of 32 × 32 × 128 while preserving the original 96 × 96 meters area. Using the approach described above, four subsets were created using different sizes of reconstructed areas defined by the lengths of square sides equal to 576 m, 288 m, 144 m, and 96 m.
The dataset was created within the joint IMPRESS-U project entitled ”EAGER IMPRESS-U: Exploratory Research on Generative Compression for Compressive Lidar” co-funded by U.S. National Science Foundation NSF under Grant No. 2404740, Science & Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU) Agreement No. 7116, and National Science Centre, Poland (NCN), Grant no. 2023/05/Y/ST6/00197.