3 July 2020 Individual tree crown detection and delineation across a woodland using leaf-on and leaf-off imagery from a UAV consumer-grade camera
Author Affiliations +
Abstract

Extraction of information about individual trees using remotely sensed data is essential to supporting ecological and commercial applications in forest environments. Data acquired by consumer-grade cameras onboard unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) offer an affordable option of high-spatial resolution imagery that can be used to extract forest structural information at a tree level. The aim of this work is to investigate the potential and accuracy of UAV time-series data to automatically detect and delineate tree crowns across an entire woodland. The workflow (presented in a step-by-step manner) involves the construction of a canopy height model (CHM) based on digital elevation models derived from the UAV photogrammetric point clouds. A watershed-based approach is modified to automatically detect and delineate the tree crowns, based on the CHM and the brightness information from the UAV orthomosaics. The accuracy of the proposed method was evaluated by comparing its results against manually delineated tree crowns. The results show an overall accuracy of 63%, where conifer species were more accurately delineated (up to 80%), while broadleaf species returned lower accuracies (<50  %  ). Continued research is necessary to improve the confidence of automated individual tree crown detection and delineation, especially over complex forest structures.

© 2020 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) 1931-3195/2020/$28.00 © 2020 SPIE
Elias F. Berra "Individual tree crown detection and delineation across a woodland using leaf-on and leaf-off imagery from a UAV consumer-grade camera," Journal of Applied Remote Sensing 14(3), 034501 (3 July 2020). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JRS.14.034501
Received: 29 January 2020; Accepted: 25 June 2020; Published: 3 July 2020
Lens.org Logo
CITATIONS
Cited by 10 scholarly publications.
Advertisement
Advertisement
RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS
Get copyright permission  Get copyright permission on Copyright Marketplace
KEYWORDS
Unmanned aerial vehicles

Clouds

RGB color model

Cameras

Data modeling

3D modeling

Error analysis

Back to Top