Automated tree crown delineation from imagery based on morphological techniques

35th International Symposium on Remote Sensing of Environment

地球科学;生态环境科学

Jing, L.^1 ; Hu, B.^2 ; Li, J.^2 ; Noland, T.^3 ; Guo, H.^1

Center for Earth Observation and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China^1

Department of Earth and Space Science and Engineering, York University, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada^2

Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Ontario Forest Research Institute, 1235 Queen St. West, Sault Ste. Marie, ON P6A 2E5, Canada^3

关键词: Color component;    High spatial resolution;    Horizontal slices;    Individual tree crown;    Multiscale method;    Natural forests;    Threedimensional (3-d);    Tree crown delineation;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/17/1/012066/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1755-1315/17/1/012066

学科分类：环境科学（综合）

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

In current tree crown delineation from imagery, treetops and three dimensional (3D) radiometric shapes of tree crowns are frequently extracted from a spectral band or a brightness component of the image and taken as references to localize and delineate tree crowns. However, color components of the image are rarely used together with the brightness component of the image to facilitate localizing and delineating crowns. The 3D radiometric shape of a crown can be derived from a brightness or color component and may be taken as a half-ellipsoid. From top to bottom of such a half-ellipsoid, multiple horizontal slices can be drawn, contain the treetop, and indicate both the location and the horizontal extent of the crown. Based on such a concept of horizontal slices of crowns, a novel multi-scale method for individual tree crown delineation from imagery was proposed in this study. In this method, the brightness and color components of the image are morphologically opened within the scale range of target crowns, horizontal slices of target crowns are extracted from the resulting opened images and integrated together to localize crowns, and one component is segmented using the watershed approach with reference to the integrated slices. In an experiment on high spatial resolution aerial imagery over natural closed canopy forests, the proposed method correctly delineated approximately 74% of mixedwood tree crowns and 59% of deciduous crowns in the natural forests.