Paper 14040-7
Paper 14040-7
Assessing gap fraction and lacunarity of forest canopy from LiDAR measurements
29 April 2026 • 2:10 PM - 2:30 PM EDT | Chesapeake 5
Abstract
In this manuscript a new framework is described for assessing gap fraction and lacunarity of forest canopy from LiDAR derived digital twins. This new approach utilizes ray tracing against the pointcloud derived geometry, allowing for analysis of the effective gap fraction and lacunarity projected along arbitrary lines of sight. This framework is applied to select forest plots to study how effective gap fraction and lacunarity varies with different viewing geometries.
Presenter
Weston Baines
Army Geospatial Ctr. (United States)
Dr. Weston Baines is a physical scientist researching LIDAR processing and applications at the U.S. Army Core of Engineers (USACE) Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) Geospatial Research Laboratory (GRL). He holds a PhD in Mathematics from Texas A&M University and has been working with Geiger-mode LIDAR imaging sensors since 2019 when he developed coincidence processing algorithms for filtering pointclouds collected from the Phoenix High-Castle Geiger-mode LIDAR sensor. He is currently the computer electronics subsystem lead for a low SWAP Geiger-mode LIDAR sensor being developed at ERDC. He is also the principal investigator for a basic research project studying the correlation of gap fraction and lacunarity with forest type and an applied research project on accelerating image processing for photon counting imaging sensors.