iLAUT – iPad laser scanner data from Austrian forest Inventory plots

The estimation of stand- and individual tree information is one of the major goals of forest inventory. Conventionally, field data in forest inventory are collected at tree level on sample plots by means of manual measurements (e.g., caliper, tape). In recent years, modern laser-supported sensors and automatic routines for feature extraction were increasingly used instead of the traditional forest inventory methods. In 2020, Apple (Apple Inc. Cupertino, California, USA) implemented a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensor into the new 4th Generation of Apple iPad Pro. Consequently, LiDAR-generated 3D point clouds can nowadays be recorded with consumer-level devices for the first time. Novel methodology is able to provide estimates of the terrain height, tree positions, stem diameters, and tree heights from these 3D point clouds. This dataset was made publicly accessible to show recent iPad 3D point clouds of forest inventory sample plots and to test new software routines for the automatic measurement of trees. Benchmark studies with performance tests of different algorithms are welcome. The dataset contains co-registered raw 3D point-cloud data collected on 21 forest inventory sample plots in Austria. The data was collected by two different laser scanning systems: (i) the iPad pro (Apple Inc. Cupertino, California, USA), and (ii) a mobile personal laser scanner (PLS) (ZEB Horizon, GeoSLAM Ltd., Nottingham, UK). The data also contains application videos of the iPad, digital terrain models (DTM), field measurements as reference data (“ground-truth”), and the output of recent software routines for the automatic tree detection and the automatic stem diameter measurement.林分与单木信息的估测是森林调查的核心目标之一。传统森林调查中，野外数据通常通过人工测量手段（如卡尺、测尺）在样地的单木尺度上采集。近年来，激光传感技术与特征提取自动化流程逐步取代传统森林调查方法，应用愈发广泛。2020年，美国加利福尼亚州库比蒂诺的苹果公司（Apple Inc.）在其第四代iPad Pro机型中搭载了激光雷达（LiDAR，Light Detection and Ranging）传感器。至此，消费者级设备首次实现了激光雷达三维点云数据的采集。当前新兴算法可基于此类三维点云数据，完成地形高程、树木位置、树干直径与树高的估测。本数据集公开发布的目的在于展示森林调查样地的最新iPad三维点云数据，并用于测试树木自动测量相关的新型软件流程，欢迎各界开展基准测试研究，对不同算法的性能进行验证。本数据集包含奥地利境内21个森林调查样地的共配准原始三维点云数据，采集自两套不同的激光扫描系统：(i) iPad Pro（苹果公司，美国加利福尼亚州库比蒂诺）；(ii) 移动式个人激光扫描仪（PLS）ZEB Horizon，英国诺丁汉GeoSLAM有限公司出品。此外，数据集还包含iPad应用视频、数字地形模型（DTM）、作为参考基准的野外实测数据（“地面真值”），以及当前主流软件流程自动检测树木与自动测量树干直径的输出结果。