Two ASPRS Awards for Pit-free CHM Algorithm

The paper 'Generating Pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne Lidar' co-authored by rapidlasso and published in the September 2014 issue of PE&RS (the journal of the ASPRS) was awarded twice at the IGTF 2015 – ASPRS Annual Conference in Tampa, Florida, USA, in May. The paper took home the John I. Davidson President’s Award for Practical Papers (2nd Place) as well as the Talbert Abrams Award (2nd Honourable Mention).

The 'pit-free' CHM paper is joint work with Anahita Khosravipour, Andrew K. Skidmore, Tiejun Wang, and Yousif A. Hussin of ITC and University of Twente, The Netherlands. It describes a technique that can create raster Canopy Height Models (CHMs) without the so called 'pits' that tend to hamper subsequent extraction of individual tree attributes such as number, location, height, and crown diameter. The paper uses data measured in the field by ITC researchers to show that pit-free CHMs significantly lower the commission and omission errors in single tree detection.

The pit-free CHM algorithm can easily be implemented with LAStools either by modifying an available batch script or by executing the LAStools Pipelines distributed with the toolboxes for ArcGIS and QGIS. A detailed blog article that compares various different methods for creating CHMs is available via the web pages of rapidlasso.

Those who are interested in the 'pit-free' CHM algorithm are probably also looking forward to the new technique that the rapidlasso team will introduce later this year at SilviLaser 2015, organised jointly with the ISPRS Geospatial Week, to take place from 28 September-2 October in La Grande Motte, France.

Visit http://rapidlasso.com for more information.