Treetop detection using convolutional neural networks trained through automatically generated pseudo labels

Abstract

ABSTRACTUsing remote sensing techniques to detect trees at the individual level is crucial for forest management while finding the treetop is an initial and important first step. However, due to the large variations of tree size and shape, traditional unsupervised treetop detectors need to be carefully designed with heuristic knowledge making an efficient and versatile treetop detection still challenging. Currently, the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown powerful capabilities to classify and segment images, but the required volume of labelled data for the training impedes their applications. Considering the strengths and limitations of the unsupervised and deep learning methods, we propose a framework using the automatically generated pseudo labels from unsupervised treetop detectors to train the CNNs, which saves the manual labelling efforts. In this study, we use multi-view satellite imagery derived digital surface model (DSM) and multispectral orthophoto as research data and train the fully convolutional networks (FCN) with pseudo labels separately generated from two unsupervised treetop detectors: top-hat by reconstruction (THR) operation and local maxima filter with a fixed window (FFW). The experiments show the FCN detectors trained by pseudo labels, have much better detection accuracies than the unsupervised detectors (6.5% for THR and 11.1% for FFW), especially in the densely forested area (more than 20% of improvement). In addition, our comparative experiments when using manually labelled samples show the proposed treetop detection framework has the potential to significantly reduce the need for training samples while keep a comparable performance.