A New Drone Laser Scanning Benchmark Dataset for Characterization of Single-Tree and Forest Biophysical Properties

Survey-grade laser scanners suitable for drones (UAV-LS) allow the efficient collection of finely detailed three-dimensional (3D) information on tree structures allowing to resolve the complexity of the forest into discrete individual trees and species as well as into different component of the tree. Current developments are hindered by the limited availability of survey-grade UAV-LS data and by the lack of a publicly available benchmark dataset for developing and validating methods. We present a new benchmarking dataset composed of manually labelled UAV-LS data covering forests in different continents and eco-regions. Such data consists in single-tree point clouds, with each point classified as either stem, branches, and leaves. This benchmark dataset offers new possibilities to develop single-tree segmentation algorithms and validate existing ones.