Individual Tree Crown Detection Using UAV Orthomosaic

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in forestry as they are economical and flexible. This study aims to present the advantages of the drone photogrammetry method in collecting individual tree crowns, as individual tree crown detection could deliver essential ecological and economic information. The referred accuracy for individual tree crown extraction is 79.2%. Only crowns that were clearly visible were selected and manually delineated on the image because the distribution of the true crown size is significantly different from the segmented crowns. The aim of this study is to investigate UAVs orthomosaics in individual tree crown detection. The objectives of this study are to produce the orthomosaic of tree crown extraction mapping using the Pix4D software and analyze the tree crowns using tree crown delineation and the OBIA algorithm. Data processing involves the processing of aerial images using Pix4Dmapper. Automatic tree crown detection involves a tree crown delineation algorithm and OBIA operations to process the tree crown extraction. The crown delineation algorithm and OBIA algorithm operation will be compared to the actual tree crown measurement in terms of diameter and area. The tree crown delineation method obtained a 0.347m mean diameter difference from the actual tree crown diameter, while the OBIA approach obtained 4.98m. The tree crown delineation method obtained 97.26% of the actual tree crown area, while OBIA obtained 91.74%.