In an urban context, tree data are used in city planning, in locating hazardous trees and in environmental monitoring. This study focuses on developing an innovative methodology to automatically estimate the most relevant individual structural parameters of urban trees sampled by a Mobile LiDAR System at city level. These parameters include the Diameter at Breast Height (DBH), which was estimated by circle fitting of the points belonging to different height bins using RANSAC. In the case of non-circular trees, DBH is calculated by the maximum distance between extreme points. Tree sizes were extracted through a connectivity analysis. Crown Base Height, defined as the length until the bottom of the live crown, was calculated by voxelization techniques. For estimating Canopy Volume, procedures of mesh generation and α-shape methods were implemented. Also, tree location coordinates were obtained by means of Principal Component Analysis. The workflow has been validated on 29 trees of different species sampling a stretch of road 750 m long in Delft (The Netherlands) and tested on a larger dataset containing 58 individual trees. The validation was done against field measurements. DBH parameter had a correlation R² value of 0.92 for the height bin of 20 cm which provided the best results. Moreover, the influence of the number of points used for DBH estimation, considering different height bins, was investigated. The assessment of the other inventory parameters yield correlation coefficients higher than 0.91. The quality of the results confirms the feasibility of the proposed methodology, providing scalability to a comprehensive analysis of urban trees.

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Intercomparison among six terrestrial laser scanner systems focused on the measurement of small elements (< 0.5 m) is performed. Phase shift (PS) and time of flight (ToF) scanners are considered. Two standard artefacts containing threedimensional printing spheres and steps of variable height are used for the experiment. Results show errors between -4.5 and 3.5 mm in the measurement of distances between step planes. The most stable systems for measuring small elements seem the Leica C10, Faro Photon and Riegl LMS Z390i. The quality of the results is linked to the overall quality of the system rather than the specific technology used for range measurement (PS or ToF) which does not appear to be a determining factor.

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Variation in the mineral composition of rocks results in a change of their spectral response capable of being studied by imaging spectroscopy. This paper proposes the use of a low-cost handy sensor, a calibrated visible-very near infrared (VIS-VNIR) multispectral camera for the recognition of different geological formations. The spectral data was recorded by a Tetracam Mini-MCA-6 camera mounted on a field-based platform covering six bands in the spectral range of 0.530-0.801 μm. Twelve sedimentary formations were selected in the Rhône-Alpes region (France) to analyse the discrimination potential of this camera for rock types and close-range mapping applications. After proper corrections and data processing, a supervised classification of the multispectral data was performed trying to distinguish four classes: limestones, marlstones, vegetation and shadows. After a maximum-likelihood classification, results confirmed that this camera can be efficiently exploited to map limestone-marlstone alternations in geological formations with this mineral composition.@en