Jakob Iglhaut (recipient of three LASmoons)
Program for Geospatial Information Management
Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, Villach, AUSTRIA
Background:
As part of the EU LIFE programme two river stretches in Carinthia, Austria have recently been subject to restoration measures. The LIFE-project aims at protecting valuable riverine flora and fauna while improving flood protection. By remodelling the river beds, the construction of groynes and still water bodies the river environment was directed to more natural morphology and state. The joint R&D project „Remotely Piloted Aircraft Multi Sensor System (RPAMSS)“ aims at capturing multi-dimensional environmental data in order to monitor the development of these rivers stretches in a holistic way. Flights with an RTK capable fixed wing UAV are carried out at a particular section of the rivers Gail and Drau respectively. The project site at the Upper-Drau is located in the area of Obergottesfeld, Austria (560m ASL), with an area currently remotely monitored by the RPAmSS of approximately 3.5km². The second study area is located close to Feistritz at the river Gail (550m ASL) with an area of approx. 0.9km². Apart from being addressed by the LIFE project both study areas are also defined as NATURA 2000 nature protection sites. In both areas frequent UAV flights are carried out collecting high-resolution multi-spectral imagery. Structure from Motion photogrammetry enables the creation of high-density multi-spectral point clouds.
Goal:
The aim of the project is to assess the morphology and related temporal changes of the described riverine environment based on SfM point clouds. A full processing chain will be developed to take full advantage of the high-density data. Particular interest lies in the extraction of ground points underneath vegetation in leaf-on/leaf-off. Ground points will be gridded to generate DTMs. The qualitative performance of the data will be held against an ALS acquired DTM. Furthermore forest metrics will be extracted for the riparian zone in order to quantify their current state and changes.
Data:
+ High-density multi-spectral (R,G,B,NIR) SfM derived point clouds (UAS imagery)
+ Variable point densities, GSD ~3cm.
LAStools processing:
1) fix SfM owing incoherence [lassort]
2) create 100m tiles (10m buffer) for parallel processing [lastile]
3) noise removal introduced by the SfM algorithm [lasnoise]
4).extract ground points [lasground_new]
5) generate normalized above heights [lasheight]
6) classify based on height-above-ground (low veg, high veg) [lasheight]
7) create DSM and DTM [blast2dem]
8) generate a Canopy Height Model (CHM) using the pit-free method of Khosravipour et al. (2014) with the workflow described here [lasthin, las2dem, lasgrid]
9) sub-sample the point clouds for other (spectral) analyses [lassplit, lasthin, lasmerge]
Reference:
Westoby, M. J., et al. „Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry: A low-cost, effective tool for geoscience applications.“ Geomorphology 179 (2012): 300-314.
Fonstad, Mark A., et al. „Topographic structure from motion: a new development in photogrammetric measurement.“ Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 38.4 (2013): 421-430.
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A.K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T.J., Hussin, Y.A., 2014. Generating pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne LiDAR. PE&RS = Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 80, 863-872.
Javernick, L., J. Brasington, and B. Caruso. „Modeling the topography of shallow braided rivers using Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry.“ Geomorphology 213 (2014): 166-182.