BACKGROUND
Spruce trees dominate boreal and temperate forest biomes and are critical to maintaining the global climate. Accurate counting of individual spruce trees and estimation of their crown span have many applications including forest inventorying, estimating the carbon captured as biomass, assessing tree health, and precision forestry practices. Very-high resolution (VHR) multispectral remote sensing image data of trees are acquired using low-flying unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs) platforms, whereafter the data are processed to yield the desired tree-level metrics/parameters in a cost-effective manner. Delineation errors occur at crown boundaries of overlapping trees due to a) lack of evident spectral or spatial difference between the neighboring crowns, b) intra-crown spectral variability, c) non-uniform illumination/shadowing, and d) under exploitation of the spectral, spatial contextual, and structural information in VHR multispectral data.
TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW
Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed an algorithm to delineate spruce tree crowns more accurately from VHR multispectral data. In this method, spectral, spatial contextual and structural information is jointly leveraged to reduce the effects of intra-crown spectral variance and non-uniform illumination/shadowing in crowns. In the novel approach, tree crowns are delineated by integrating the structural and spatial-contextual information modelled capability on a Fuzzy C-means spectral classifier. The framework of the process is illustrated in Figure 1. We refer to the algorithm as the Spectral, Spatial-contextual, and Structural Information based Individual Tree Crown Delineation (S3-ITD).
Figure 1. Block scheme of the Spectral, Spatial-contextual, and Structural Information based Individual Tree Crown Delineation method (S3-ITD) crown detection and delineation method for VHR multispectral data. The geometric and radiometric corrections of the VHR data are performed using the photogrammetrically derived Digital Surface Model (DSM), and the known reflectance panel parameters, respectively. The set of treetops
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
- More accurate delineation of spruce crowns
- An improvement in the average Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.1 and 0.05, and the lower
average absolute Crown-Area Difference (CAD) of 0.8 m2 and 0.2 m2 respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art Marker-controlled Watershed Segmentation (WS-ITD) and the Bias-Field Segmentation Algorithm (BF-ITD) methods.
- An improvement in the average Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.1 and 0.05, and the lower
- Cost-effective collection and processing of canopy level data
- Labor reduced due to the use of optical UAV data, fully-automatic end-to end processing, and scalability.
APPLICATIONS
- Tree crown delineation for forestry and agricultural applications
- Biomass and carbon capture determination
- Effect of abiotic factors on tree growth
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY STATUS
- Provisional patent application filed (April, 2021)
PROJECT STATUS
The S3-ITD delineation of tree crowns has been tested in the field. The study area is in Saint-Casimir (Quebec) and contains both managed and unmanaged forests. A Micasense Red-Edge multispectral camera mounted on a DJI Matrice M600 UAV/drone were used to acquire the VHR images of eight circular plots (10 m radius). Tree crowns were manually identified by an expert operator and compared to those delineated using the S3-ITD algorithm and two other benchmark state-of-the-art (SoA) algorithms (i.e. the WS-ITD and the BF-ITD algorithms).
