LAUT – Terrestrial and Personal laser scanner data from Austrian forest Inventory plots

In forest inventory, trees are usually measured by handheld instruments; among the most relevant are calipers, inclinometers, ultrasonic devices, and laser range finders. Traditional forest inventory is nowadays redesigned, since modern laser scanner technology became available. Laser scanner generate massive data in the form of 3D point clouds. Novel methodology is currently developed to provide estimates of the tree positions, stem diameters, and tree heights from these 3D point clouds. This dataset was made publicly accessible to test new software routines for the automatic measurement of forest trees using laser scanner data. Benchmark studies with performance tests of different algorithms are welcome. The dataset contains co-registered raw 3D point-cloud data collected on 20 forest inventory sample plots in Austria. The data was collected by two different laser scanning systems: (i) a mobile personal laser scanner (PLS) (ZEB Horizon, GeoSLAM Ltd., Nottingham, UK), and (ii) a static terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) (Focus3D X330, Faro Technologies Inc., Lake Mary, FL, USA). The data also contains digital terrain models (DTM), field measurements as reference data (“ground-truth”), and the output of recent software routines for the automatic tree detection and the automatic stem diameter measurement.