Reliable large-scale data on the state of forests is crucial for monitoring ecosystem health, carbon stock, and the impact of climate change. Current knowledge of tree species distribution relies heavily on manual data collection in the field, which often takes years to complete, resulting in limited datasets that cover only a small subset of the world's forests. Recent works show that state-of-the-art deep learning models using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) images enable accurate and scalable classification of tree species in various ecosystems. While LiDAR images contain rich 3D information, most previous works flatten the 3D images into 2D projections to use Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). This paper offers three significant contributions: (1) we apply the deep learning framework for tree classification in tropical savannas; (2) we use Airborne LiDAR images, which have a lower resolution but greater scalability than Terrestrial LiDAR images used in most previous works; (3) we introduce the approach of directly feeding 3D point cloud images into a vision transformer model (PCTreeS). Our results show that the PCTreeS approach outperforms current CNN baselines with 2D projections in AUC (0.81), overall accuracy (0.72), and training time (~45 mins). This paper also motivates further LiDAR image collection and validation for accurate large-scale automatic classification of tree species.

Abstract: Point cloud data from 3D LiDAR sensors are one of the most crucial sensor modalities for versatile safety-critical applications such as self-driving vehicles. Since the annotations of point cloud data is an expensive and time-consuming process, therefore recently the utilization of simulated environments and 3D LiDAR sensors for this task started to get some popularity. With simulated sensors and environments, the process for obtaining an annotated synthetic point cloud data became much easier. However, the generated synthetic point cloud data are still missing the artifacts usually exist in point cloud data from real 3D LiDAR sensors. As a result, the performance of the trained models on this data for perception tasks when tested on real point cloud data is degraded due to the domain shift between simulated and real environments.

Point cloud data from 3D LiDAR sensors are one of the most crucial sensor modalities for versatile safety-critical applications such as self-driving vehicles. Since the annotations of point cloud data is an expensive and time-consuming process, therefore recently the utilisation of simulated environments and 3D LiDAR sensors for this task started to get some popularity. With simulated sensors and environments, the process for obtaining an annotated synthetic point cloud data became much easier. However, the generated synthetic point cloud data are still missing the artefacts usually exist in point cloud data from real 3D LiDAR sensors. As a result, the performance of the trained models on this data for perception tasks when tested on real point cloud data is degraded due to the domain shift between simulated and real environments. Thus, in this work, we are proposing a domain adaptation framework for bridging this gap between synthetic and real point cloud data. Our proposed framework is based on the deep cycle-consistent generative adversarial networks (CycleGAN) architecture. We have evaluated the performance of our proposed framework on the task of vehicle detection from a bird's eye view (BEV) point cloud images coming from real 3D LiDAR sensors. The framework has shown competitive results with an improvement of more than 7% in average precision score over other baseline approaches when tested on real BEV point cloud images.