Extraction of Liana Stems Using Geometric Features from Terrestrial Laser Scanning Point Clouds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lianas are self-supporting systems that are increasing their dominance in tropical forests due to climate change. As lianas increase tree mortality and reduce tree growth, one key challenge in ecological remote sensing is the separation of a liana and its host tree using remote sensing techniques. This separation can provide essential insights into how tropical forests respond, from the point of view of ecosystem structure to climate and environmental change. Here, we propose a new machine learning method, derived from Random Forest (RF) and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoosting) algorithms, to separate lianas and trees using Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) point clouds. We test our method on five tropical dry forest trees with different levels of liana infestation. First, we use a multiple radius search method to define the optimal radius of six geometric features. Second, we compare the performance of RF and XGBoosting algorithms on the classification of lianas and trees. Finally, we evaluate our model against independent data collected by other projects. Our results show that the XGBoosting algorithm achieves an overall accuracy of 0.88 (recall of 0.66), and the RF algorithm has an accuracy of 0.85 (recall of 0.56). Our results also show that the optimal radius method is as accurate as the multiple radius method, with F1 scores of 0.49 and 0.48, respectively. The RF algorithm shows the highest recall of 0.88 on the independent data. Our method provides a new flexible approach to extracting lianas from 3D point clouds, facilitating TLS to support new studies aimed to evaluate the impact of lianas on tree and forest structures using point clouds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".