A Study on a Wavelet Transform-Based Inversion Method for Forest Leaf Area Index Retrieval

Leaf Area Index (LAI) is one of the key parameters for characterizing leaf density, vegetation growth status, and canopy structure. Rapid, objective, and accurate acquisition of forest LAI is of great significance for studying forest ecosystems and forestry production. This study focuses on the core issue of accurately segmenting leaf elements from background elements in hemispherical photography used for forest LAI measurement, with a particular focus on meeting the real-time requirements of embedded platforms. The differences in grayscale values and frequency characteristics between leaf regions, trunk regions, and sky regions in vegetation canopy images were leveraged to decompose, process, and reconstruct such images using a 9/7 wavelet-based transformation method, achieving efficient and precise segmentation of leaf regions. Through the extraction of canopy gap fraction, rapid LAI measurement was enabled. Comparative experimental results showed that the proposed inversion method exhibited a high correlation with the LAI-2200C measurement results (r=0.847, RMSE=0.431), fully verifying its accuracy across different forest ecological environments. This study provides strong support for the development of portable, high-precision LAI measurement devices and holds practical application value and broad application prospects.