# Multimodal classification of forest biodiversity potential from 2D orthophotos and 3D airborne laser scanning point clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01728 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01728/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Classification: A New Benchmark Dataset and Classification Model on Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04616/) (2019)
- [PointNeXt: Revisiting PointNet++ with Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04670/) (2022)
- [A high-resolution canopy height model of the Earth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08322/) (2022)
- [Classification of Hyperspectral and LiDAR Data Using Coupled CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01144/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Assessment of forest biodiversity is crucial for ecosystem management and conservation. While traditional field surveys provide high-quality assessments, they are labor-intensive and spatially limited. This study investigates whether deep learning-based fusion of close-range sensing data from 2D orthophotos and 3D airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds can reliable assess the biodiversity potential of forests. We introduce the BioVista dataset, comprising 44378 paired samples of orthophotos and ALS point clouds from temperate forests in Denmark, designed to explore multimodal fusion approaches. Using deep neural networks (ResNet for orthophotos and PointVector for ALS point clouds), we investigate each data modality's ability to assess forest biodiversity potential, achieving overall accuracies of 76.7% and 75.8%, respectively. We explore various 2D and 3D fusion approaches: confidence-based ensembling, feature-level concatenation, and end-to-end training, with the latter achieving an overall accuracies of 82.0% when separating low- and high potential forest areas. Our results demonstrate that spectral information from orthophotos and structural information from ALS point clouds effectively complement each other in the assessment of forest biodiversity potential.