Performance, effectiveness and computational efficiency of powerline extraction methods for quantifying ecosystem structure from light detection and ranging

National and regional data products of the ecosystem structure derived from airborne laser scanning (ALS) surveys with Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) technology are essential for ecology, biodiversity, and ecosystem monitoring. However, noises like powerlines often remain, hindering the accurate measurement of 3D ecosystem structures from LiDAR. Currently, there is a lack of studies assessing powerline noise removal in the context of generating data products of ecosystem structures from ALS point clouds. Here, we assessed the (1) performance and accuracy, (2) effectiveness, and (3) time efficiency and execution time of three powerline extraction methods (i.e. two point-based methods based on deep learning and eigenvalue decomposition, respectively, and one hybrid method) for removing powerline noise when quantifying 3D ecosystem structures in landscapes with varying canopy heights and vegetation openness. Twenty-five LiDAR metrics representing three key dimensions of the ecosystem structure (i.e. vegetation height, cover, and vertical variability) across 10 study areas in the Netherlands were used for our assessment. The deep learning method had the best performance and showed the highest accuracy of powerline removal across various landscape types (average F 1 score = 96%), closely followed by the hybrid method (average F 1 score = 95%). In contrast, the accuracy of the eigenvalue decomposition method was lower (average F 1 score = 82%) and depended on landscape context and vegetation composition (e.g. the F 1 score decreased from 96% to 63% when the average canopy height increased across landscapes). Powerline noise removal had the highest effectiveness (i.e. generating LiDAR metrics closest to those derived from manually labeled ground truth data) for LiDAR metrics capturing height and cover of low- and high-vegetation layers. Time efficiency (processed points per second) was highest for the eigenvalue decomposition method, yet the hybrid method reduced the execution time by > 50% compared to the deep learning method (ranging from 20% to 89% in study areas with different landscape composition). Based on our findings, we recommend the hybrid method for upscaling powerline removal on multi-terabyte ALS datasets to a regional or national extent because of its high accuracy and computational efficiency. Remaining misclassifications in LiDAR metrics could be further minimized by improving the training dataset for deep learning models (e.g. including various shapes of transmission towers from different datasets). Our findings provide novel insights into the performance of different powerline extraction methods, how their effectiveness varies for improving vegetation metrics and mapping the 3D ecosystem structure from LiDAR, and their computational efficiency for upscaling powerline removal in multi-terabyte ALS datasets to a national extent.

Automated summary

Data products of ecosystem structure derived from airborne laser scanning (ALS) surveys are important for ecological monitoring. This study assessed three powerline extraction methods and found that the deep learning method had the best performance.