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Monitoring forest growth accurately is important for assessing and controlling forest carbon stocks that impact, for example, the atmospheric CO2 concentration and, consequently, the climate change. In prior studies, forest growth monitoring with laser scanning methods has resulted in relatively high errors. However, the contribution of reference measurement error to uncertainty in growth resolution has rarely been analysed, and the reference measurements are usually considered mostly flawless. In this study, a seven-year-long growth of individual trees was estimated using both airborne and terrestrial laser scanning (ALS, TLS) that have emerged as potential candidates for digital forest reference measurements. The growth values were derived for diameter at breast height (DBH) and stem volume between the years 2014 and 2021 using an indirect approach. The values obtained with laser scanning were paired with manual field measurements and also with each other to study pairwise errors. The pairwise comparison showed that even though all the three measurement methods produced good Pearson correlation coefficients for one-time measurements (all above 0.88), the coefficients for growth measurements were significantly lower (0.19–0.44 for DBH and 0.47–0.66 for stem volume). The best correlation and root mean squared deviation (RMSD) for DBH growth (ρ = 0.44, RMSD = 0.98 cm) and stem volume growth (ρ = 0.66, RMSD = 0.052 m3) was observed between the manual field measurements and the ALS-based growth measurement method, in which the tree stem curve was obtained from the 2021 point cloud, and the stem curve was predicted backwards for the year 2014 according to height growth. The ALS method suffered less from outlying values than the TLS-based growth measurement method, in which the growth was computed based on the difference of stem curves derived separately for the years 2014 and 2021. The study showed that observing the stem curve is a potential method for short-period growth monitoring. Using the pairwise comparison results, we further derived estimates for the mean and standard deviation of measurement error of each individual measurement method. For the manual measurements, the standard deviation of error was found to be approximately 0.4 cm for DBH growth and 0.03 m3 for volume growth, which were the lowest of the three methods but not by a large margin. This highlights the need for more accurate reference data as the accuracy of laser scanning-based growth estimation methods continues to approach the accuracy of manual measurements.

Automating forest machines to optimize the forest value chain requires the ability to map the surroundings of the machine and to conduct accurate measurements of nearby trees. In the near-to-medium term, integrating a forest harvester with a mobile laser scanner system may have multiple applications, including real-time assistance of the harvester operator using laser-scanner-derived tree measurements and the collection of vast amounts of training data for large-scale airborne laser scanning-based surveys at the individual tree level. In this work, we present a comprehensive processing flow for a mobile laser scanning (MLS) system mounted on a forest harvester starting from the localization of the harvester under the forest canopy followed by accurate and automatic estimation of tree attributes, such as diameter at breast height (DBH) and stem curve. To evaluate our processing flow, we recorded and processed MLS data from a commercial thinning operation on three test strips with a total driven length ranging from 270 to 447 m in a managed Finnish spruce forest stand containing a total of 658 reference trees within a distance of 15 m from the harvester trajectory. Localization reference was obtained by a robotic total station, while reference tree attributes were derived using a high-quality handheld laser scanning system. As some applications of harvester-based MLS require real-time capabilities while others do not, we investigated the positioning accuracy both for real-time localization of the harvester and after the optimization of the full trajectory. In the real-time positioning mode, the absolute localization error was on average 2.44 m, while the corresponding error after the full optimization was 0.21 m. Applying our automatic stem diameter estimation algorithm for the constructed point clouds, we measured DBH and stem curve with a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 3.2 cm and 3.6 cm, respectively, while detecting approximately 90% of the reference trees with DBH>20 cm that were located within 15 m from the harvester trajectory. To achieve these results, we demonstrated a distance-adjusted bias correction method mitigating diameter estimation errors caused by the high beam divergence of the laser scanner used.

Improving the speed and fidelity of quantum logic gates is essential to reach quantum advantage with future quantum computers. However, fast logic gates lead to increased leakage errors in superconducting quantum processors based on qubits with low anharmonicity, such as transmons. To reduce leakage errors, we propose and experimentally demonstrate two new analytical methods, Fourier ansatz spectrum tuning derivative removal by adiabatic gate (FAST DRAG) and higher-derivative (HD) DRAG, both of which enable shaping single-qubit control pulses in the frequency domain to achieve stronger suppression of leakage transitions compared to previously demonstrated pulse shapes. Using the new methods to suppress the ef transition of a transmon qubit with an anharmonicity of −212 MHz, we implement R_{X}(π/2) gates achieving a leakage error below 3.0×10^{−5} down to a gate duration of 6.25 ns without the need for iterative closed-loop optimization. The obtained leakage error represents a 20-fold reduction in leakage compared to a conventional cosine DRAG pulse. Employing the FAST DRAG method, we further achieve an error per gate of (1.56±0.07)×10^{−4} at a 7.9-ns gate duration, outperforming conventional pulse shapes both in terms of error and gate speed. Furthermore, we study error-amplifying measurements for the characterization of temporal microwave control-pulse distortions, and demonstrate that non-Markovian coherent errors caused by such distortions may be a significant source of error for sub-10-ns single-qubit gates unless corrected using predistortion.

The use of mobile laser scanning for mapping forests has scarcely been studied in difficult forest conditions. In this paper, we compare the accuracy of retrieving tree attributes, particularly diameter at breast height (DBH), stem curve, stem volume, and tree height, using six different laser scanning systems in a managed natural boreal forest. These compared systems operated both under the forest canopy on handheld and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms and above the canopy from a helicopter. The complexity of the studied forest sites ranged from easy to difficult, and thus, this is the first study to compare the performance of several laser scanning systems for the direct measurement of stem curve in difficult forest conditions. To automatically detect tree stems and to calculate their attributes, we utilized our previously developed algorithm integrated with a novel bias compensation method to reduce the overestimation of stem diameter arising from finite laser beam divergence. The bias compensation method reduced the absolute value of the diameter bias by 55–99%. The most accurate laser scanning systems were equipped with a Velodyne VLP-16 sensor, which has a relatively low beam divergence, on a handheld or UAV platform. In easy plots, these systems found a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of below 10% for DBH and stem curve estimates and approximately 10% for stem volume. With the handheld system in difficult plots, the DBH and stem curve estimates had an RMSE under 10%, and the stem volume RMSE was below 20%. Even though bias compensation reduced the difference in bias and RMSE between laser scanners with high and low beam divergence, the RMSE remained higher for systems with a high beam divergence. The airborne laser scanner operating above the forest canopy provided tree attribute estimates close to the accuracy of the under-canopy laser scanners, but with a significantly lower completeness rate for stem detection, especially in difficult forest conditions.

While transmon is the most widely used superconducting qubit, the search for alternative qubit designs with improved characteristic is ongoing. Hyyppä et al. demonstrate a novel superconducting qubit, the unimon, that combines high anharmonicity and protection against low-frequency charge noise and flux noise.

Tree species characterise biodiversity, health, economic potential, and resilience of an ecosystem, for example. Tree species classification based on remote sensing data, however, is known to be a challenging task. In this paper, we study for the first time the feasibility of tree species classification using high-density point clouds collected with an airborne close-range multispectral laser scanning system – a technique that has previously proved to be capable of providing stem curve and volume accurately and rapidly for standing trees. To this end, we carried out laser scanning measurements from a helicopter on 53 forest sample plots, each with a size of 32 m × 32 m. The plots covered approximately 5500 trees in total, including Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.), Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) H.Karst.), and deciduous trees such as Downy birch (Betula pubescens Ehrh.) and Silverbirch (Betula pendula Roth). The multispectral laser scanning system consisted of integrated Riegl VUX-1HA, miniVUX-3UAV, and VQ-840-G scanners (Riegl GmbH, Austria) operating at wavelengths of 1550 nm, 905 nm, and 532 nm, respectively. A new approach, layer-by-layer segmentation, was developed for individual tree detection and segmentation from the dense point cloud data. After individual tree segmentation, 249 features were computed for tree species classification, which was tested with approximately 3000 trees. The features described the point cloud geometry as well as single-channel and multi-channel reflectance metrics. Both feature selection and the tree species classification were conducted using the random forest method. Using the layer-by-layer segmentation algorithm, trees in the dominant and co-dominant categories were found with detection rates of 89.5% and 77.9%, respectively, whereas suppressed trees were detected with a success rate of 15.2%–42.3%, clearly improving upon the standard watershed segmentation. The overall accuracy of the tree species classification was 73.1% when using geometric features from the 1550 nm scanner data and 86.6% when combining the geometric features with reflectance information of the 1550 nm data. The use of multispectral reflectance and geometric features improved the overall classification accuracy up to 90.8%. Classification accuracies were as high as 92.7% and 93.7% for dominant and co-dominant trees, respectively.

Today, high-quality reference tree measurements, including the position, diameter, height and volume, are cumbersome and slow to carry out, but highly needed for forest inventories based on airborne laser scanning. Mobile laser scanning technologies hold the promise for collecting reference data for forest inventories with an extremely high efficiency. Perhaps, the most efficient approach for reference data collection would be to mount a high-resolution laser scanning system on board an airborne vehicle flying at a low altitude above the forest canopy since this would allow recording reference samples of individual trees with the speed of flight. To demonstrate the potential of this technology, we mounted an in-house developed HeliALS-DW laser scanning system on board a helicopter and collected point cloud data in a boreal forest on three test sites containing a total of 1469 trees. The obtained point clouds incorporated sufficiently many high-quality stem hits for estimating the stem curves and stem volumes of individual trees since the point clouds had a relatively high point density of 2200–3800 echoes/m2, and the scanner had been tilted by 15° from the nadir to increase the possibility of recording stem hits. To automatically estimate the diameters at breast height (DBH) and stem curves of individual trees, we used algorithms designed to tolerate moderate drifts in the trajectory of the laser scanner. Furthermore, the stem volumes of individual trees were computed by using the estimated stem curves and tree heights without any allometric models. Using the proposed methods, we were able to estimate the stem curves with a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 1.7–2.6 cm (6–9%) while detecting 42–71% of the trees. The RMSE of stem volume estimates was 0.1–0.15 m3 (12–21%). We also showed that the tree detection rate could be improved up to 87–96% for trees with a DBH exceeding 20 cm if slightly larger average errors for the stem attributes were allowed. Our results pave the way for using high-resolution airborne laser scanning for field reference data collection by conducting direct measurements of tree stems with a high efficiency.

Abstract Background Current automated forest investigation is facing a dilemma over how to achieve high tree- and plot-level completeness while maintaining a high cost and labor efficiency. This study tackles the challenge by exploring a new concept that enables an efficient fusion of aerial and terrestrial perspectives for digitizing and characterizing individual trees in forests through an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that flies above and under canopies in a single operation. The advantage of such concept is that the aerial perspective from the above-canopy UAV and the terrestrial perspective from the under-canopy UAV can be seamlessly integrated in one flight, thus grants the access to simultaneous high completeness, high efficiency, and low cost. Results In the experiment, an approximately 0.5 ha forest was covered in ca. 10 min from takeoff to landing. The GNSS-IMU based positioning supports a geometric accuracy of the produced point cloud that is equivalent to that of the mobile mapping systems, which leads to a 2–4 cm RMSE of the diameter at the breast height estimates, and a 4–7 cm RMSE of the stem curve estimates. Conclusions Results of the experiment suggested that the integrated flight is capable of combining the high completeness of upper canopies from the above-canopy perspective and the high completeness of stems from the terrestrial perspective. Thus, it is a solution to combine the advantages of the terrestrial static, the mobile, and the above-canopy UAV observations, which is a promising step forward to achieve a fully autonomous in situ forest inventory. Future studies should be aimed to further improve the platform positioning, and to automatize the UAV operation.

The continuous flow of autonomous vehicle-based data could revolutionize current map updating procedures and allow completely new types of mapping applications. Therefore, in this article, we demonstrate the feasibility of using perception data of autonomous vehicles to replace traditionally conducted mobile mapping surveys with a case study focusing on updating a register of roadside city trees. In our experiment, we drove along a 1.3-km-long road in Helsinki to collect laser scanner data using our autonomous car platform ARVO, which is based on a Ford Mondeo hybrid passenger vehicle equipped with a Velodyne VLS-128 Alpha Prime scanner and other high-grade sensors for autonomous perception. For comparison, laser scanner data from the same region were also collected with a specially-planned high-grade mobile mapping laser scanning system. Based on our results, the diameter at breast height, one of the key parameters of city tree registers, could be estimated with a lower root-mean-square error from the perception data of the autonomous car than from the specially-planned mobile laser scanning survey, provided that time-based filtering was included in the post-processing of the autonomous perception data to mitigate distortions in the obtained point cloud. Therefore, appropriately performed post-processing of the autonomous perception data can be regarded as a viable option for keeping maps updated in road environments. However, point cloud-processing algorithms may need to be adapted for the post-processing of autonomous perception data due to the differences in the sensors and their arrangements compared to designated mobile mapping systems. We also emphasize that time-based filtering may be required in the post-processing of autonomous perception data due to point cloud distortions around objects seen at multiple times. This highlights the importance of saving the time stamp for each data point in the autonomous perception data or saving the temporal order of the data points.

Forest is one of the most challenging environments to be recorded in a three-dimensional (3D) digitized geometrical representation, because of the size and the complexity of the environment and the data-acquisition constraints brought by on-site conditions. Previous studies have indicated that the data-acquisition pattern can have more influence on the registration results than other factors. In practice, the ideal short-baseline observations, i.e., the dense collection mode, is rarely feasible, considering the low accessibility in forest environments and the commonly limited labor and time resources. The wide-baseline observations that cover a forest site using a few folds less observations than short-baseline observations, are therefore more preferable and commonly applied. Nevertheless, the wide-baseline approach is more challenging for data registration since it typically lacks the required sufficient overlaps between datasets. Until now, a robust automated registration solution that is independent of special hardware requirements has still been missing. That is, the registration accuracy is still far from the required level, and the information extractable from the merged point cloud using automated registration could not match that from the merged point cloud using manual registration. This paper proposes a discrete overlap search (DOS) method to find correspondences in the point clouds to solve the low-overlap problem in the wide-baseline point clouds. The proposed automatic method uses potential correspondences from both original data and selected feature points to reconstruct rough observation geometries without external knowledge and to retrieve precise registration parameters at data-level. An extensive experiment was carried out with 24 forest datasets of different conditions categorized in three difficulty levels. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated using various accuracy criteria, as well as based on data acquired from different hardware, platforms, viewing perspectives, and at different points of time. The proposed method achieved a 3D registration accuracy at a 0.50-cm level in all difficulty categories using static terrestrial acquisitions. In the terrestrial-aerial registration, data sets were collected from different sensors and at different points of time with scene changes, and a registration accuracy at the raw data geometric accuracy level was achieved. These results represent the highest automated registration accuracy and the strictest evaluation so far. The proposed method is applicable in multiple scenarios, such as 1) the global positioning of individual under-canopy observations, which is one of the main challenges in applying terrestrial observations lacking a global context, 2) the fusion of point clouds acquired from terrestrial and aerial perspectives, which is required in order to achieve a complete forest observation, 3) mobile mapping using a new stop-and-go approach, which solves the problems of lacking mobility and slow data collection in static terrestrial measurements as well as the data-quality issue in the continuous mobile approach. Furthermore, this work proposes a new error estimate that units all parameter-level errors into a single quantity and compensates for the downsides of the widely used parameter- and object-level error estimates; it also proposes a new deterministic point sets registration method as an alternative to the popular sampling methods.

In this paper, we present a simple, efficient, and robust algorithm for 2D coarse registration of two point clouds. In the proposed algorithm, the locations of some distinct objects are detected from the point cloud data, and a rotation- and translation-invariant feature descriptor vector is computed for each of the detected objects based on the relative locations of the neighboring objects. Subsequently, the feature descriptors obtained for the different point clouds are compared against one another by using the Euclidean distance in the feature space as the similarity criterion. By using the nearest neighbor distance ratio, the most promising matching object pairs are found and further used to fit the optimal Euclidean transformation between the two point clouds. Importantly, the time complexity of the proposed algorithm scales quadratically in the number of objects detected from the point clouds. We demonstrate the proposed algorithm in the context of forest inventory by performing coarse registration between terrestrial and airborne point clouds. To this end, we use trees as the objects and perform the coarse registration by using no other information than the locations of the detected trees. We evaluate the performance of the algorithm using both simulations and three test sites located in a boreal forest. We show that the algorithm is fast and performs well for a large range of stem densities and for test sites with up to 10 ​000 trees. Additionally, we show that the algorithm works reliably even in the case of moderate errors in the tree locations, commission and omission errors in the tree detection, and partial overlap of the data sets. We also demonstrate that additional tree attributes can be incorporated into the proposed feature descriptor to improve the robustness of the registration algorithm provided that reliable information of these additional tree attributes is available. Furthermore, we show that the registration accuracy between the terrestrial and airborne point clouds can be significantly improved if stem positions estimated from the terrestrial data are matched to stem positions obtained from the airborne data instead of matching them to tree top positions estimated from the airborne data. Even though the 2D coarse registration algorithm is demonstrated in the context of forestry, the algorithm is not restricted to forest data and it may potentially be utilized in other applications, in which efficient 2D point set registration is needed.

Tunable coupling of superconducting qubits has been widely studied due to its importance for isolated gate operations in scalable quantum processor architectures. Here, we demonstrate a tunable qubit-qubit coupler based on a floating transmon device, which allows us to place qubits at least 2 mm apart from each other while maintaining over 50-MHz coupling between the coupler and the qubits. In the introduced tunable-coupler design, both the qubit-qubit and the qubit-coupler couplings are mediated by two waveguides instead of relying on direct capacitive couplings between the components, reducing the impact of the qubit-qubit distance on the couplings. This leaves space for each qubit to have an individual readout resonator and a Purcell filter, which is needed for fast high-fidelity readout. In addition, simulations show that the large qubit-qubit distance significantly lowers unwanted non-nearest-neighbor coupling and allows multiple control lines to cross over the structure with minimal crosstalk. Using the proposed flexible and scalable architecture, we demonstrate a controlled-Z gate with (99.81±0.02)% fidelity.

This paper studied the applicability of the Roamer-R4DW mobile laser scanning (MLS) system for road rut depth measurement. The MLS system was developed by the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute (FGI), and consists of two mobile laser scanners and a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-inertial measurement unit (IMU) positioning system. In the study, a fully automatic algorithm was developed to calculate and analyze the rut depths, and verified in 64 reference pavement plots (1.0 m × 3.5 m). We showed that terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) data is an adequate reference for MLS-based rutting studies. The MLS-derived rut depths based on 64 plots resulted in 1.4 mm random error, which can be considered adequate precision for operational rutting depth measurements. Such data, also covering the area outside the pavement, would be ideal for multiple road environment applications since the same data can also be used in applications, from high-definition maps to autonomous car navigation and digitalization of street environments over time and in space.

In this work, we compared six emerging mobile laser scanning (MLS) technologies for field reference data collection at the individual tree level in boreal forest conditions. The systems under study were an in-house developed AKHKA-R3 backpack laser scanner, a handheld Zeb-Horizon laser scanner, an under-canopy UAV (Unmanned Aircraft Vehicle) laser scanning system, and three above-canopy UAV laser scanning systems providing point clouds with varying point densities. To assess the performance of the methods for automated measurements of diameter at breast height (DBH), stem curve, tree height and stem volume, we utilized all of the six systems to collect point cloud data on two 32 m-by-32 m test sites classified as sparse (n = 42 trees) and obstructed (n = 43 trees). To analyze the data collected with the two ground-based MLS systems and the under-canopy UAV system, we used a workflow based on our recent work featuring simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) technology, a stem arc detection algorithm, and an iterative arc matching algorithm. This workflow enabled us to obtain accurate stem diameter estimates from the point cloud data despite a small but relevant time-dependent drift in the SLAM-corrected trajectory of the scanner. We found out that the ground-based MLS systems and the under-canopy UAV system could be used to measure the stem diameter (DBH) with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 2–8%, whereas the stem curve measurements had an RMSE of 2–15% that depended on the system and the measurement height. Furthermore, the backpack and handheld scanners could be employed for sufficiently accurate tree height measurements (RMSE = 2–10%) in order to estimate the stem volumes of individual trees with an RMSE of approximately 10%. A similar accuracy was obtained when combining stem curves estimated with the under-canopy UAV system and tree heights extracted with an above-canopy flying laser scanning unit. Importantly, the volume estimation error of these three MLS systems was found to be of the same level as the error corresponding to manual field measurements on the two test sites. To analyze point cloud data collected with the three above-canopy flying UAV systems, we used a random forest model trained on field reference data collected from nearby plots. Using the random forest model, we were able to estimate the DBH of individual trees with an RMSE of 10–20%, the tree height with an RMSE of 2–8%, and the stem volume with an RMSE of 20–50%. Our results indicate that ground-based and under-canopy MLS systems provide a promising approach for field reference data collection at the individual tree level, whereas the accuracy of above-canopy UAV laser scanning systems is not yet sufficient for predicting stem attributes of individual trees for field reference data with a high accuracy.