Accuracy assessment of a mobile terrestrial laser scanner for tree crops

LiDAR technology is one option to collect spatial data about canopy geometry in many crops. However, the method of data acquisition includes many errors related to the LiDAR sensor, the GNSS receiver and the data acquisition set up. Therefore, the objective of this study was to evaluate the errors involved in the data acquisition from a mobile terrestrial laser scanner (MTLS). Regular shaped objects were scanned with a developed MTLS in two different tests: i) with the system mounted on a vehicle and ii) with the system mounted on a platform running over a rail. The errors of area estimation varied between 0.001 and 0.071 m2 for the circle, square and triangle objects. The errors on volume estimations were between 0.0003 and 0.0017 m3, for cylinders and truncated cone.