# Super-Resolution of Airborne Laser Scanning Point Clouds for Forest Inventory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02201 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02201/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2026.

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

- [PU-Net: Point Cloud Upsampling Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.06761/) (2018)
- [PU-GAN: a Point Cloud Upsampling Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10844/) (2019)
- [Patch-based Progressive 3D Point Set Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11286/) (2018)
- [PU-GCN: Point Cloud Upsampling using Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03264/) (2019)
- [Point Cloud Upsampling via Disentangled Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04779/) (2021)
- [Grad-PU: Arbitrary-Scale Point Cloud Upsampling via Gradient Descent with Learned Distance Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11846/) (2023)
- [Scaling Diffusion Models to Real-World 3D LiDAR Scene Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13470/) (2024)
- [A Conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Point Cloud Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02719/) (2023)
- [SegmentAnyTree: A sensor and platform agnostic deep learning model for tree segmentation using laser scanning data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15739/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning Based 3D Point Cloud Regression for Estimating Forest Biomass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11335/) (2021)
- [Efficient Point Clouds Upsampling via Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15286/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) can collect point clouds across large areas, enabling large-scale forest inventory. However, ALS point clouds are sparse and noisy, resulting in inaccurate individual-tree-level forest inventory, such as stem localization and tree size estimation. To overcome this problem, we propose a deep learning model, 3D Forest Super Resolution (3DFSR), to simultaneously improve point density and reduce noise for ALS forest point cloud. 3DFSR is a voxel-based CNN with a U-Net architecture. The proposed 3DFSR is evaluated on ALS point clouds collected in both temperate forests in the U.S. and boreal forests in Germany. Experimental results demonstrate that 3DFSR can generate finer point clouds of tree structure than other state-of-the-art point cloud super-resolution algorithms, achieving 0.249 m Chamfer Distance and 2.711 m Hausdorff Distance. Furthermore, to verify the effectiveness of 3DFSR point clouds in forest inventory, we conduct stem detection, DBH measurements, and stem reconstruction on both original ALS point clouds and 3DFSR enhanced point clouds. We find that stem detection and reconstruction algorithms developed for TLS/MLS point clouds can directly work on our 3DFSR point clouds, and DBH can be derived with circle-fitting method. F1 score of stem detection is improved from 0.71 on original ALS point clouds to 0.97 on 3DFSR point clouds; DBH estimation improves from 13.45 cm RMSE using allometric equations to 6.43 cm using circle fitting; comparing to stems reconstruction from MLS point clouds, stem reconstructed from 3DFSR point clouds has 0.170 m of Chamfer Distance and 0.377 m of Hausdorff Distance, and 0.95 R2 volume estimation. Finally, we find that the proposed 3DFSR is applicable to process point densities from 10 to 1700 points/m2; it also can be generalized across data collected from different LiDAR platforms without transfer learning.