Smartphone based hemispherical photography for canopy structure measurement

The canopy is the most direct and active interface layer of the interaction between plant and environment, and has important influence on energy exchange, biodiversity, ecosystem matter and climate change. The measurement about canopy structure of plant is an important foundation to analyze the pattern, process and operation mechanism of forest ecosystem. Through the study of canopy structure of plant, solar radiation, ambient wind speed, air temperature and humidity, soil evaporation, soil temperature and other forest environmental climate characteristics can be evaluated. Because of its accuracy and effectiveness, canopy structure measurement based on hemispherical photography has been widely studied. However, the traditional method of canopy structure hemispherical photogrammetry based on SLR camera and fisheye lens. This method is expensive and difficult to be used in some low-cost occasions. In recent years, smartphone technology has been developing rapidly. The smartphone not only has excellent image acquisition ability, but also has the considerable computational processing ability. In addition, the gyroscope and positioning function on the smartphone will also help to measure the structure of the canopy. In this paper, we present a smartphone based hemispherical photography system. The system consists of smart phones, low-cost fisheye lenses and PMMA adapters. We designed an Android based App to obtain the canopy hemisphere images through low-cost fisheye lenses and provide horizontal collimation information. In addition, the App will add the acquisition location tag obtained by GPS and auxiliary positioning method in hemisphere image information after the canopy structure hemisphere image acquisition. The system was tested in the urban forest after it was completed. The test results show that the smartphone based hemispherical photography system can effectively collect the high-resolution canopy structure image of the plant.