Automated tree crown delineation from imagery based on morphological techniques

Abstract

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.