Mobile Phone Depth Sensors for Forest Carbon Measurement
| dc.contributor.author | Holcomb, Amelia | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2021-05-28T14:01:33Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2021-05-28T14:01:33Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2021-05-28 | |
| dc.date.submitted | 2021-05-26 | |
| dc.description.abstract | The monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) of forest plots, especially their tree-trunk diameters, is critical to achieving both forest protection and reforestation goals. Today’s MRV processes are mostly manual, error-prone, and costly to carry out. In this thesis, we design and implement an app running on a smartphone equipped with a time-of-flight sensor that allows efficient, low-cost, and accurate measurement of tree trunk diameters. The core focus is on designing an algorithm to identify, segment, and compute the diameter of a target tree trunk in a depth image of a forest scene, even in the face of natural leaf and branch occlusion. The algorithm runs in real-time on the phone, allowing user interaction to improve the quality of the results. We evaluate the app in realistic settings and find that in a corpus of 55 sample tree images, it estimates trunk diameter with mean error of 7.8%. We also explore a newly released alternative to the time-of-flight sensor, Google's ARCore Depth API, which uses a depth-from-motion algorithm based on a monocular phone camera and accelerometer sensors. We conclude that this API is currently inadequate for the proposed application and offer suggestions for its improvement. | en |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10012/17043 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en |
| dc.pending | false | |
| dc.publisher | University of Waterloo | en |
| dc.subject | forest carbon | en |
| dc.subject | mobile phone | en |
| dc.subject | depth sensor | en |
| dc.title | Mobile Phone Depth Sensors for Forest Carbon Measurement | en |
| dc.type | Master Thesis | en |
| uws-etd.degree | Master of Mathematics | en |
| uws-etd.degree.department | David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science | en |
| uws-etd.degree.discipline | Computer Science | en |
| uws-etd.degree.grantor | University of Waterloo | en |
| uws-etd.embargo.terms | 0 | en |
| uws.contributor.advisor | Keshav, Srinivasan | |
| uws.contributor.advisor | Brecht, Tim | |
| uws.contributor.affiliation1 | Faculty of Mathematics | en |
| uws.peerReviewStatus | Unreviewed | en |
| uws.published.city | Waterloo | en |
| uws.published.country | Canada | en |
| uws.published.province | Ontario | en |
| uws.scholarLevel | Graduate | en |
| uws.typeOfResource | Text | en |