Towards an automatic segmentation and classification of multi-source point clouds for Arctic to boreal permafrost ecosystem analysis

<p>Remotely sensed point clouds provide&#160;detailed structural data of landscapes and ecosystem characteristics. Especially in the analysis of forests and topography, this data type has proven its ability to derive relevant quantitative parameters&#160;such as biomass or subsidence rates.&#160;Arctic and boreal permafrost ecosystems are severely affected by climate change and resulting vegetation shifts,&#160;environmental&#160;disturbances, and permafrost thaw which lead&#160;to rapid changes in these northern environments that can be detected and characterized with point cloud datasets.&#160;In recent decades, the amount of point clouds acquired and generated in high-latitude regions by terrestrial (TLS), mobile (MLS), unmanned aerial system (UAS)&#160;based (ULS), up to airborne-based (ALS)&#160;LiDAR&#160;(Light detection and ranging) and Structure from Motion (SfM) has steadily increased. Multi-temporal datasets are available for a wide range of observation targets.</p> <p>The characteristics of the point clouds such as the extent of the area covered as well as the point density and thus the level of detail differ depending on the sensor, method, and the acquisition specifications. To use point cloud data for topographic, morphological, and forestry analysis, segmentation and classification of the point cloud into specific components such as individual trees, stems, foliage, or terrain features&#160;is essential. This is a time-consuming manual process and not feasible when addressing large datasets. Several previous analyses showed the potential for machine learning-based semantic segmentation of a single point cloud type, e.g., terrestrial LiDAR (TLS) with identical acquisition mode and sensor. We aim at an automated segmentation of different point cloud types generated by i)&#160;TLS, MLS, ULS and ALS&#160;as well as ii) SfM using (multi)spectral UAS and airborne image data to enable an analysis of Arctic and boreal permafrost ecosystems. Thereby, we will focus on the following questions:</p> <p>1) How can we reduce the time consuming process of labeling the point clouds?</p> <p>2) Can we train a model for segmentation using all point clouds or does transfer learning lead to better results?</p> <p>3) To what level of detail can we accurately segment and classify the different point&#160;cloud types?</p> <p>With this automated segmentation and classification, we aim to open up the possibility of exploiting the information contained in the multitude of point cloud data for a variety of ecological research applications.</p>