Lidar-based individual tree species classification using convolutional neural network

Author(s):  
Tomohiro Mizoguchi ◽  
Akira Ishii ◽  
Hiroyuki Nakamura ◽  
Tsuyoshi Inoue ◽  
Hisashi Takamatsu
Author(s):  
T. Mizoguchi ◽  
A. Ishii ◽  
H. Nakamura

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> In this paper, we propose a new method for specifying individual tree species based on depth and curvature image creation from point cloud captured by terrestrial laser scanner and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Given a point cloud of an individual tree, the proposed method first extracts the subset of points corresponding to a trunk at breast-height. Then branches and leaves are removed from the extracted points by RANSAC -based circle fitting, and the depth image is created by globally fitting a cubic polynomial surface to the remaining trunk points. Furthermore, principal curvatures are estimated at each scanned point by locally fitting a quadratic surface to its neighbouring points. Depth images clearly capture the bark texture involved by its split and tear-off, but its computation is unstable and may fail to acquire bark shape in the resulting images. In contrast, curvature estimation enables stable computation of surface concavity and convexity, and thus it can well represent local geometry of bark texture in the curvature images. In comparison to the depth image, the curvature image enables accurate classification for slanted trees with many branches and leaves. We also evaluated the effectiveness of a multi-modal approach for species classification in which depth and curvature images are analysed together using CNN and support vector machine. We verified the superior performance of our proposed method for point cloud of Japanese cedar and cypress trees.</p>


Author(s):  
C. Sothe ◽  
L. E. C. la Rosa ◽  
C. M. de Almeida ◽  
A. Gonsamo ◽  
M. B. Schimalski ◽  
...  

Abstract. The classification of tree species can significantly benefit from high spatial and spectral information acquired by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) associated with advanced feature extraction and classification methods. Different from the traditional feature extraction methods, that highly depend on user’s knowledge, the convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method can automatically learn and extract the spatial-related features layer by layer. However, in order to capture significant features of the data, the CNN classifier requires a large number of training samples, which are hardly available when dealing with tree species in tropical forests. This study investigated the following topics concerning the classification of 14 tree species in a subtropical forest area of Southern Brazil: i) the performance of the CNN method associated with a previous step to increase and balance the sample set (data augmentation) for tree species classification as compared to the conventional machine learning methods support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF) using the original training data; ii) the performance of the SVM and RF classifiers when associated with a data augmentation step and spatial features extracted from a CNN. Results showed that the CNN classifier outperformed the conventional SVM and RF classifiers, reaching an overall accuracy (OA) of 84.37% and Kappa of 0.82. The SVM and RF had a poor accuracy with the original spectral bands (OA 62.67% and 59.24%) but presented an increase between 14% and 21% in OA when associated with a data augmentation and spatial features extracted from a CNN.


2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eetu Puttonen ◽  
Paula Litkey ◽  
Juha Hyyppä

PeerJ ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. e6227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Dalponte ◽  
Lorenzo Frizzera ◽  
Damiano Gianelle

An international data science challenge, called National Ecological Observatory Network—National Institute of Standards and Technology data science evaluation, was set up in autumn 2017 with the goal to improve the use of remote sensing data in ecological applications. The competition was divided into three tasks: (1) individual tree crown (ITC) delineation, for identifying the location and size of individual trees; (2) alignment between field surveyed trees and ITCs delineated on remote sensing data; and (3) tree species classification. In this paper, the methods and results of team Fondazione Edmund Mach (FEM) are presented. The ITC delineation (Task 1 of the challenge) was done using a region growing method applied to a near-infrared band of the hyperspectral images. The optimization of the parameters of the delineation algorithm was done in a supervised way on the basis of the Jaccard score using the training set provided by the organizers. The alignment (Task 2) between the delineated ITCs and the field surveyed trees was done using the Euclidean distance among the position, the height, and the crown radius of the ITCs and the field surveyed trees. The classification (Task 3) was performed using a support vector machine classifier applied to a selection of the hyperspectral bands and the canopy height model. The selection of the bands was done using the sequential forward floating selection method and the Jeffries Matusita distance. The results of the three tasks were very promising: team FEM ranked first in the data science competition in Task 1 and 2, and second in Task 3. The Jaccard score of the delineated crowns was 0.3402, and the results showed that the proposed approach delineated both small and large crowns. The alignment was correctly done for all the test samples. The classification results were good (overall accuracy of 88.1%, kappa accuracy of 75.7%, and mean class accuracy of 61.5%), although the accuracy was biased toward the most represented species.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (24) ◽  
pp. 2948 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hoang Minh Nguyen ◽  
Begüm Demir ◽  
Michele Dalponte

Tree species classification at individual tree crowns (ITCs) level, using remote-sensing data, requires the availability of a sufficient number of reliable reference samples (i.e., training samples) to be used in the learning phase of the classifier. The classification performance of the tree species is mainly affected by two main issues: (i) an imbalanced distribution of the tree species classes, and (ii) the presence of unreliable samples due to field collection errors, coordinate misalignments, and ITCs delineation errors. To address these problems, in this paper, we present a weighted Support Vector Machine (wSVM)-based approach for the detection of tree species at ITC level. The proposed approach initially extracts (i) different weights associated to different classes of tree species, to mitigate the effect of the imbalanced distribution of the classes; and (ii) different weights associated to different training samples according to their importance for the classification problem, to reduce the effect of unreliable samples. Then, in order to exploit different weights in the learning phase of the classifier a wSVM algorithm is used. The features to characterize the tree species at ITC level are extracted from both the elevation and intensity of airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data. Experimental results obtained on two study areas located in the Italian Alps show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (23) ◽  
pp. 2788 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uwe Knauer ◽  
Cornelius Styp von Rekowski ◽  
Marianne Stecklina ◽  
Tilman Krokotsch ◽  
Tuan Pham Minh ◽  
...  

In this paper, we evaluate different popular voting strategies for fusion of classifier results. A convolutional neural network (CNN) and different variants of random forest (RF) classifiers were trained to discriminate between 15 tree species based on airborne hyperspectral imaging data. The spectral data was preprocessed with a multi-class linear discriminant analysis (MCLDA) as a means to reduce dimensionality and to obtain spatial–spectral features. The best individual classifier was a CNN with a classification accuracy of 0.73 +/− 0.086. The classification performance increased to an accuracy of 0.78 +/− 0.053 by using precision weighted voting for a hybrid ensemble of the CNN and two RF classifiers. This voting strategy clearly outperformed majority voting (0.74), accuracy weighted voting (0.75), and presidential voting (0.75).


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