Estimating the Diameter at Breast Height of Trees in a Forest from RGB

Understand

Forest inventories rely on accurate measurements of the diameter at breast height (DBH) for ecological monitoring, resource management, and carbon accounting.

• While LiDAR-based techniques can achieve centimeter-level precision, they are cost-prohibitive and operationally complex.
• We present a low-cost alternative that only needs a consumer-grade 360 video camera.
• Our semi-automated pipeline comprises of (i) a dense point cloud reconstruction using Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry software called Agisoft Metashape, (ii) semantic trunk segmentation by projecting Grounded Segment Anything (SAM) masks onto the 3D cloud, and (iii) a robust RANSAC-based technique to estimate cross section shape and DBH.