ForestScanner Taps Apple's LIDAR Hardware for Quick and Easy Community Ecology Tree Surveys
Designed to make forestry surveys a cinch, this iPhone and iPad app quickly captures key data — including the diameter of the trunk.
Community ecologist and Hokkaido Research Center researcher Shinichi Tatsumi has shown off a work-in-progress iPhone and iPad app, which uses the devices' integrated LIDAR hardware to quickly and accurately take measurements of trees — just by waving the device around a forest.
"ForestScanner [is] an iPhone/iPad application that allows LIDAR-based tree measurement," Tatsumi explains in a brief demonstration. In the accompanying video, the app is shown taking a scan of larch trees in a sparse forest — automatically capturing color imagery, 3D point cloud data, and a measurement of the width of the tree's trunk.
Following a scan — which requires little user interaction beyond pointing the device at trees — a short data capture screen is shown, having gathered latitude and longitude for the tree's location, elevation, the seemingly manually-entered tree species, and the diameter of the trunk.
It's not the first time Apple's LIDAR hardware — a system for direction and ranging like radar, but with light rather than radio waves — has been used in a 3D-scanning app: Polycom launched its LIDAR-based 3D scanning app last year, followed by a photogrammetry release which can operate using simple cameras only.
Tatsumi has not indicated when ForestScanner will be released, beyond promising it's "coming soon," but interested parties should keep an eye on Twitter for more.