UAV DTM acquisition in a forested area - comparison of low-cost photogrammetry (DJI Zenmuse P1) and LiDAR solutions (DJI Zenmuse L1)

In this paper, we evaluated the results in terms of accuracy and coverage of the LiDAR-UAV system DJI Zenmuse L1 and Digital Aerial Photogrammetric system (DAP - UAV) DJI Zenmuse P1 in a forested area under leaf-off conditions on three sites with varying terrain ruggedness/tree type combinations. Detailed reference clouds were obtained using terrestrial scanning by Leica P40. Our results show that branches pose no problem to the accuracy of LiDAR-UAV and DAP-UAV derived terrain clouds. Elevation accuracies for photogrammetric data were even better than for LiDAR data - as low as 0.015 m on all sites. However, the LiDAR system provided better coverage, with almost full coverage at all sites, while the DAP-UAV coverage declined with the increasing density of branches (being worst in the young forest). In the very dense young forest (Site 1), the coverage by photogrammetrically extracted terrain cloud using high calculation quality and no filtering achieved 80.7% coverage, while LiDAR-UAV reached almost 100% coverage. The importance of the use of multiple (or last) returns when using LiDAR-UAV systems was demonstrated by the fact that on the site with the densest vegetation, only 11% of the ground points were represented by first returns.

Automated summary

In this study, the accuracy and coverage of LiDAR-UAV system DJI Zenmuse L1 and Digital Aerial Photogrammetric system (DAP-UAV) DJI Zenmuse P1 were evaluated in a forested area under leaf-off conditions on three sites with varying terrain ruggedness and tree type combinations. The results showed that branches did not affect the accuracy of the LiDAR-UAV and DAP-UAV derived terrain clouds. The photogrammetric data had even better elevation accuracy than LiDAR data, reaching as low as 0.015 m on all sites. However, the LiDAR system provided better coverage, with almost full coverage at all sites, while the DAP-UAV coverage declined with increasing density of branches.