Capabilities of UAV-Based Watershed Segmentation Method for Estimating Tree Crown: A Case Study of Oil Palm Tree

Abstract

Abstract Currently, the tree crown delineation has become an important part of the tree parameter measurement in particular for the forest management plan. Moreover, the requirement for the advanced information on forest resources has headed researchers to built-up more effective approaches. With the advanced in the technology of imagery, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has become one of the appearance tools that offers an affordable, cheaper and faster technology in acquiring data for numerous applications. More importantly, this technology has its own efficient approaches for real-time acquisition of high resolution to produce three-dimensional (3D) information. The digital surface model was extracted and used to estimate tree crown. The influences of different filtering method such as Gaussian and Laplacian filter were investigated on tree crown estimation. The result shows the differences in tree crown delineation that were confirmed by processing methods. This study has potential for future use by tree parameters that related researcher, industries and farmers to estimate tree height and tree counting.