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Tree trunk monitoring is crucial for both industrial and environmental applications, as well as for ecological preservation. To date, Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) has shown promising results in mapping the inner structures of tree trunks, which could lead to novel forest management practices and support preventing the collapse of trees in urban areas. This is crucial to avoid harming the lives and properties of citizens. Nevertheless, it has been observed that the irregular geometry of the tree trunk surface can cause mismatches in associating the GPR traces to their correct position along the bark and, hence, distortion in the processed GPR images. This can escalate into an incorrect location of internal targets of interest, e.g., holes and decays within the tree trunk. To this end, this research aims to correct the effect of GPR data distortion along complex tree trunk surface geometries, by locating the GPR A-scans (traces) in their actual position. First, Smartphone Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology, a multi-angle measuring ruler, and a high-resolution camera are employed to extract the irregular contours of a sample tree bark. GPR data are subsequently collected along the measured surface and correlated with the respective profile’s traces. The methods’ accuracy is investigated by way of comparison between the different employed edge detection techniques through laboratory measurements on an oak tree trunk sample. The results show that the Smartphone LiDAR technology improves the accuracy of the reconstructed images of tree trunks by providing high-precision and affordable coordinate information. This integrated technique has great potential for enhancing the prediction of the location of decays in tree trunks and creating more accurate GPRimage- based models. The achieved results pave the way for novel forest management practices and contribute to preserving ecological systems.
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