DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14609648
title: Stack-LAUT - Point clouds of wood stacks and reference measurements of a sawmill

description: Measuring wood is an important task in forestry and the wood industry, but the manual measurement of wood is time consuming and therefore costly. For this reason, the automation of the wood measuring process is important. Automated wood measurements along the forestry-wood supply chain could also increase the flow of information from the forst to the mill, improving the traceability of wood and allowing for more precise planning. Modern solutions like photo-optical measurements are already well researched, but they often require precise external measurements (required to scale the photo) and are dependend on lighting conditions, stacking quality of the wood stack and alignment of the camera to the face of the stack for accurate measurement results. LiDAR sensors are a promising alternative, as these devices are active sensors and capture 3D data, eliminating most potential sources of error. This dataset was made publicly available to develop and test new software routines for the automated measurement of wood stacks and individual logs within wood stacks.

The dataset contains point clouds of 10 different wood stacks that were scanned using three different LiDAR devices: the terrestrial laser scanner RIEGL VZ-600i (RIEGL Laser Measurement Systems GmbH, Horn, AUT), the personal laser scanner GeoSLAM ZEB Horizon RT (GeoSLAM Ltd., Nottingham, UK) and the iPad Pro 11 (Apple Inc. Cupertino, California, USA). The point clouds of each of these devices can be found in the appropriately labeled folders ("Point clouds wood stacks - ..."). The reference data (according to an electronic 3D log measurement system of a sawmill) containing the measurements of each log of the wood stacks is saved as CSV-files (one for each stack) in the folder "Mill measurements.zip". The acronyms used in these CSV-files are explained in the file "Explanations column headers mill measurements.docx". In order to get the net volume of each wood stack, the individual log volumes of the respective stack have to be summed up.

Information on individual logs within a wood stack can also prove to be very important for forest owners and the wood industry. For this reason an attempt was made to make a connection between individual logs within the stacks and their mill measurements by marking 281 logs across all 10 stacks with spray paint. The point clouds of the 10 wood stacks including the marks can be found in the folder "Point clouds wood stacks marked logs.zip". They were recorded using the RIEGL VZ-600i (RIEGL Laser Measurement Systems GmbH, Horn, AUT). The assignment of the marked logs to the identification number of the logs' mill measurements can be found in the Excel-files in the folder "Mapping marked logs mill measurement number.zip". In these files the number that was spray painted on the logs ("No. on stack") is mapped to the number that log was assigned during mill measurement ("No. mill protocol"). This number according to the mill measurement can also be found in the CSV-files of the mill measurement mentioned in the paragraph above. This allows for an exact comparison between the mill and LiDAR measurements of the marked logs. 

Note: When mapping the marked logs to their respective numbers in the measurement protocols one marking was not recognizable, meaning that in total 280 logs could be successfully assigned to their respective measurements.