The statistics of range images from natural environments is a largely unexplored field of research. It closely relates to the statistical modeling of the scene geometry in natural environments, and the modeling of optical natural images. We have used a 3D laser range-finder to collect range images from mixed forest scenes. The images are here analyzed with respect to different statistics.

Large calibrated datasets of 'random' natural images have recently become available. These make possible precise and intensive statistical studies of the local nature of images. We report results ranging from the simplest single pixel intensity to joint distribution of 3 Haar wavelet responses. Some of these statistics shed light on old issues such as the near scale-invariance of image statistics and some are entirely new. We fit mathematical models to some of the statistics and explain others in terms of local image features.