The “FOREST” action is an individual fellowship for Dr Milto Miltiadou that aims to advance algorithms using emerging technologies related to full-waveform LiDAR, while assisting a young researcher to further improve her intellectual, transferable and scientific skills related to earth observation and environmental sciences, as well as give direct experience in participating in proposals. This action explores analysis and data understanding of full-waveform LiDAR, as well as fusion with other Earth Observation data for forestry applications. It advances and evaluates algorithms, which will be added to DASOS for reaching end users and stakeholders. This action further disseminates the results for raising awareness about the new algorithms and tools, increasing this way the usage of full-waveform LiDAR in remote forest surveying. It also makes link with the industry by exchanging knowledge between partners.

 

The objectives of this fellowship are the following:

Scientific Objectives:

  1. Improve and evaluate remote forest surveying algorithms that will benefits forest management
  2. Assessment of tree health using increased complexity of features extracted at object level
  3. Evaluating the performance of voxelising dense point clouds acquired by the discrete TLS system
  4. Fusion with Earth Observation imagery
  5. Investigate approaches of calibrating and improving the voxelisation process of full-waveform LiDAR
  6. Enable processing of very large scale datasets of voxelised full-waveform LiDAR in an efficient manner
  7. Enable forestry experts with no computer science expertise to work with voxelised full-waveform LiDAR

Training and mobility objectives:

  1. Strengthen the capacity of the researcher in new topics such as TLS and earth observation imagery
  2. Disseminate the results of the action to different target audiences

 

Acknowledgements

The “FOREST” project, with project protocol number “OPPORTUNITY/0916/MSCA/0005”, is co–financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the Republic of Cyprus through the Cyprus Research & Innovation Foundation. The implementation of the “FOREST” project is taking place at department of Civil Engineering and Geomatics at Cyprus University of Technology.