1 What is Arbor?
1.1 Arbor C++ Library
Arbor is an open-source standalone C++ library designed for processing mobile laser scanning data in forestry applications. To make it accessible and user-friendly, the core library is wrapped in convenient APIs. Arbor currently provides one public API, the R package described in this book, with another API actively under development.
The C++ library is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPL-3). Anyone is free to use, study, modify, and integrate Arbor into their own software, as long as that software also complies with the terms of the GPL-3.
1.2 Arbor R Package
You are currently reading the documentation for Arbor’s R interface. Using Arbor in R is straightforward and requires little to no programming experience. However, users who are comfortable working with code can leverage the full flexibility of the package to build custom workflows and applications.
The Arbor R package is free and open source under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPL-3).
1.3 Arbor Studio
ArborStudio is a desktop application with a graphical user interface designed for users who prefer a drag-and-drop workflow: load files, click a few buttons, and generate outputs without writing code.
But ArborStudio is much more than a simple GUI. It is also an interactive editor that allows manual correction of classifications using tools specifically designed for forestry workflows. Users can inspect point clouds, manually reassign points to the correct trees, refit QSMs, and use other specialized editing tools. The software is intended for two main types of users:
- Practitioners: to work outside R without coding
- Researchers: to easily achieve perfect segmentation manually in order to build validation datasets and/or train models
ArborStudio is currently under active development and is not yet publicly available. It may or may not be released as open source. Depending on the level of community interest and financial support for ArborStudio’s development, the software may eventually be released either for free or under a commercial license.
Regardless of the business model chosen for ArborStudio, the core Arbor engine will remain fully free and open source.
The video below presents an early prototype of ArborStudio and its ability to quickly and easily perform manual instance corrections.