State of the Art in Positioning Under Forest Canopies

Dear Colleagues,

Accurate and reliable positioning in 2D/3D is a vital and key technology for moving platforms (such as persons, unmanned aerial vehicles, all-terrain vehicles and harvesters, etc.) under forest canopies where the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) has difficulties in achieving this target due to the occlusion and absorption of the canopy on the GNSS signals. Accurate position data of moving platforms under forest canopies is crucial for collecting forest inventory data, providing the fundamental information for all decision-making in society and industry that are relevant to human interventions. Currently, large number of measures and tools have been developed and introduced to achieve this target in forests, e.g., advanced GNSS with real-time kinematic measurements, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping using laser scanning/camera data, and the use of pseudo-satellites such as ultra-wideband. To date, many problems still need to be considered, e.g., cost, accuracy, efficiency, scalability and reliability, etc. Thus, the state-of-the-art in positioning under forest canopies is still an important and open research topic.

This Special Issue aims at contributions that focus on advanced positioning for moving platforms under forest canopies. Therefore, we are particularly interested in original papers that present innovative techniques with excellent performance especially in accuracy and reliability, propose advanced data-processing algorithms for laser scanning/camera data for positioning, and present new applications using the obtained position data in forest environments.

Dr. Zuoya Liu
Prof. Dr. Harri Kaartinen
Dr. Heikki Hyyti
Dr. Jian Zhou
Guest Editors

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