Quantitative evaluation of GPS performance under forest canopies

There is an increasing demand for use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) to navigate or track objects in the forest. However, objects near a GPS receiver antenna, such as tree leaves and branches, can reflect GPS signals and result in large position errors. Canopies in the forest will also block satellite signals and cause the GPS receiver to stop updating data. This is of practical significance for evaluating the performance of GPS in the forest environment. A field test was conducted to understand how large the position errors are and how long the position updates may be deferred under different levels of canopy densities. A digital camera was used to record the canopies over the test site. Image processing techniques, especially Otsu's algorithm, were used and the canopy density was classified into three levels. The ANOVA was used to analyze the effect of canopy density on the GPS position errors. The result shows that the GPS position errors are significantly different under different canopy density levels. The GPS data-update frequency was also analyzed, and the result indicates that the scheduled position update intervals are lengthened due to the existence of forest canopies.