SPIG Students Shine in International Internship at NCBR Poland

Poland, December, 2024 – A group of 30 talented students, including five representatives from the Surveying, Mapping, and Geographic Information (SPIG) program at Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia (UPI), participated in the Technical Workshop on Tree Segmentation for Precision Forestry. The event was hosted by Krzysztof Stereńczak and his team at the Forest Research Institute, in collaboration with IDEAS NCBR, Onliwood, and UNIGIS.

The workshop, which took place at the Department of Geomatics, focused on cutting-edge research in delineating individual trees using Terrestrial Laser Scanners (TLS) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. Students worked with over 600 forest plots and 20,000 trees, representing key forest species across Poland and Central Europe. Their task was to manually annotate high-quality tree segmentation data, contributing to the REMBIOFOR project funded by The National Centre for Research and Development.

“This effort is crucial for advancing species classification, biomass estimation, and tree disease detection,” explained Stereńczak. “Tree segmentation is challenging due to the complex and overlapping structures of tree crowns, and AI-based solutions require large datasets labeled by human annotators. The students’ contributions have been invaluable.”

The program provided SPIG students with hands-on experience in processing LiDAR data, point cloud analysis, and the application of AI models. They also had the opportunity to collaborate with international peers from institutions such as the Warsaw University of Life Sciences (SGGW), Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS), and the University of Agriculture in Krakow.

As part of this initiative, the annotated dataset will be openly shared for further research, amplifying the students’ impact on scientific advancements in precision forestry. The workshop also drew inspiration from the 3DForEcoTech COST Action project and Stefano Puliti’s #FORspecies20K initiative.

This collaboration underscores the commitment of UPI’s SPIG program to fostering global academic partnerships and equipping students with skills to tackle real-world challenges in geospatial sciences. The participation of SPIG students highlights their growing reputation in the international geospatial research community.