scholarly journals Detecting European Aspen (Populus tremula L.) in Boreal Forests Using Airborne Hyperspectral and Airborne Laser Scanning Data

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (16) ◽  
pp. 2610
Author(s):  
Arto Viinikka ◽  
Pekka Hurskainen ◽  
Sarita Keski-Saari ◽  
Sonja Kivinen ◽  
Topi Tanhuanpää ◽  
...  

Sustainable forest management increasingly highlights the maintenance of biological diversity and requires up-to-date information on the occurrence and distribution of key ecological features in forest environments. European aspen (Populus tremula L.) is one key feature in boreal forests contributing significantly to the biological diversity of boreal forest landscapes. However, due to their sparse and scattered occurrence in northern Europe, the explicit spatial data on aspen remain scarce and incomprehensive, which hampers biodiversity management and conservation efforts. Our objective was to study tree-level discrimination of aspen from other common species in northern boreal forests using airborne high-resolution hyperspectral and airborne laser scanning (ALS) data. The study contained multiple spatial analyses: First, we assessed the role of different spectral wavelengths (455–2500 nm), principal component analysis, and vegetation indices (VI) in tree species classification using two machine learning classifiers—support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF). Second, we tested the effect of feature selection for best classification accuracy achievable and third, we identified the most important spectral features to discriminate aspen from the other common tree species. SVM outperformed the RF model, resulting in the highest overall accuracy (OA) of 84% and Kappa value (0.74). The used feature set affected SVM performance little, but for RF, principal component analysis was the best. The most important common VI for deciduous trees contained Conifer Index (CI), Cellulose Absorption Index (CAI), Plant Stress Index 3 (PSI3), and Vogelmann Index 1 (VOG1), whereas Green Ratio (GR), Red Edge Inflection Point (REIP), and Red Well Position (RWP) were specific for aspen. Normalized Difference Red Edge Index (NDRE) and Modified Normalized Difference Index (MND705) were important for coniferous trees. The most important wavelengths for discriminating aspen from other species included reflectance bands of red edge range (724–727 nm) and shortwave infrared (1520–1564 nm and 1684–1706 nm). The highest classification accuracy of 92% (F1-score) for aspen was achieved using the SVM model with mean reflectance values combined with VI, which provides a possibility to produce a spatially explicit map of aspen occurrence that can contribute to biodiversity management and conservation efforts in boreal forests.

2020 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ville Vähä-Konka ◽  
Matti Maltamo ◽  
Timo Pukkala ◽  
Kalle Kärhä

Abstract Key message We examined the accuracy of the stand attribute data based on airborne laser scanning (ALS) provided by the Finnish Forest Centre. The precision of forest inventory data was compared for the first time with operative logging data measured by the harvester. Context Airborne laser scanning (ALS) is increasingly used together with models to predict the stand attributes of boreal forests. The information is updated by growth models. Information produced by remote sensing, model prediction, and growth simulation needs field verification. The data collected by harvesters on logging sites provide a means to evaluate and verify the accuracy of the ALS-based data. Aims This study investigated the accuracy of ALS-based forest inventory data provided by the Finnish Forest Centre at the stand level, using harvester data as the reference. Special interest was on timber assortment volumes where the quality reductions of sawlog are model predictions in ALS-based data and true realized reductions in the logging data. Methods We examined the accuracy of total volume and timber assortment volumes by comparing ALS-based data and operative logging data measured by a harvester. This was done both for clear cuttings and thinning sites. Accuracy of the identification of the dominant tree species of the stand was examined using the Kappa coefficient. Results In clear-felling sites, the total harvest removals based on ALS and model prediction had a RMSE% of 26.0%. In thinning, the corresponding difference in the total harvested removal was 42.4%. Compared to logged volume, ALS-based prediction overestimated sawlog removals in clear cuttings and underestimated pulpwood removals. Conclusion The study provided valuable information on the accuracy of ALS-based stand attribute data. Our results showed that ALS-based data need better methods to predict the technical quality of harvested trees, to avoid systematic overestimates of sawlog volume. We also found that the ALS-based estimates do not accurately predict the volume of trees removed in actual thinnings.


2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gudrun Norstedt ◽  
Anna-Lena Axelsson ◽  
Hjalmar Laudon ◽  
Lars Östlund

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 1219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lan Zhang ◽  
Hongjun Su ◽  
Jingwei Shen

Dimensionality reduction (DR) is an important preprocessing step in hyperspectral image applications. In this paper, a superpixelwise kernel principal component analysis (SuperKPCA) method for DR that performs kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) on each homogeneous region is proposed to fully utilize the KPCA’s ability to acquire nonlinear features. Moreover, for the proposed method, the differences in the DR results obtained based on different fundamental images (the first principal components obtained by principal component analysis (PCA), KPCA, and minimum noise fraction (MNF)) are compared. Extensive experiments show that when 5, 10, 20, and 30 samples from each class are selected, for the Indian Pines, Pavia University, and Salinas datasets: (1) when the most suitable fundamental image is selected, the classification accuracy obtained by SuperKPCA can be increased by 0.06%–0.74%, 3.88%–4.37%, and 0.39%–4.85%, respectively, when compared with SuperPCA, which performs PCA on each homogeneous region; (2) the DR results obtained based on different first principal components are different and complementary. By fusing the multiscale classification results obtained based on different first principal components, the classification accuracy can be increased by 0.54%–2.68%, 0.12%–1.10%, and 0.01%–0.08%, respectively, when compared with the method based only on the most suitable fundamental image.


Silva Fennica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alwin Hardenbol ◽  
Anton Kuzmin ◽  
Lauri Korhonen ◽  
Pasi Korpelainen ◽  
Timo Kumpula ◽  
...  

Current remote sensing methods can provide detailed tree species classification in boreal forests. However, classification studies have so far focused on the dominant tree species, with few studies on less frequent but ecologically important species. We aimed to separate European aspen ( tremula L.), a biodiversity-supporting tree species, from the more common species in European boreal forests ( L., [L.] Karst., spp.). Using multispectral drone images collected on five dates throughout one thermal growing season (May–September), we tested the optimal season for the acquisition of mono-temporal data. These images were collected from a mature, unmanaged forest. After conversion into photogrammetric point clouds, we segmented crowns manually and automatically and classified the species by linear discriminant analysis. The highest overall classification accuracy (95%) for the four species as well as the highest classification accuracy for aspen specifically (user’s accuracy of 97% and a producer’s accuracy of 96%) were obtained at the beginning of the thermal growing season (13 May) by manual segmentation. On 13 May, aspen had no leaves yet, unlike birches. In contrast, the lowest classification accuracy was achieved on 27 September during the autumn senescence period. This is potentially caused by high intraspecific variation in aspen autumn coloration but may also be related to our date of acquisition. Our findings indicate that multispectral drone images collected in spring can be used to locate and classify less frequent tree species highly accurately. The temporal variation in leaf and canopy appearance can alter the detection accuracy considerably.PopulusPinus sylvestrisPicea abiesBetula


Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (12) ◽  
pp. 4391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aimin Miao ◽  
Jiajun Zhuang ◽  
Yu Tang ◽  
Yong He ◽  
Xuan Chu ◽  
...  

Variety classification is an important step in seed quality testing. This study introduces t-distributed stochastic neighbourhood embedding (t-SNE), a manifold learning algorithm, into the field of hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and proposes a method for classifying seed varieties. Images of 800 maize kernels of eight varieties (100 kernels per variety, 50 kernels for each side of the seed) were imaged in the visible- near infrared (386.7–1016.7 nm) wavelength range. The images were pre-processed by Procrustes analysis (PA) to improve the classification accuracy, and then these data were reduced to low-dimensional space using t-SNE. Finally, Fisher’s discriminant analysis (FDA) was used for classification of the low-dimensional data. To compare the effect of t-SNE, principal component analysis (PCA), kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) and locally linear embedding (LLE) were used as comparative methods in this study, and the results demonstrated that the t-SNE model with PA pre-processing has obtained better classification results. The highest classification accuracy of the t-SNE model was up to 97.5%, which was much more satisfactory than the results of the other models (up to 75% for PCA, 85% for KPCA, 76.25% for LLE). The overall results indicated that the t-SNE model with PA pre-processing can be used for variety classification of waxy maize seeds and be considered as a new method for hyperspectral image analysis.


2013 ◽  
Vol 718-720 ◽  
pp. 1033-1036 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shi Jun He ◽  
Shi Ting Zhao ◽  
Fan Bai ◽  
Jia Wei

The spatial data which acquired by 3D laser scanning is huge, aiming at the iteration time is long with classic ICP algorithm, a improved registration algorithm of spatial data ICP algorithm which based on principal component analysis (PCA) is proposed in this paper (PCA-ICP), the basic principle and steps of PCA-ICP algorithm are given. The experiment results show that this method is feasible and the iterative time of PCA-ICP algorithm is shorter than classical ICP algorithm.


2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 1115-1125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Melin ◽  
Juho Matala ◽  
Lauri Mehtätalo ◽  
Raisa Tiilikainen ◽  
Olli-Pekka Tikkanen ◽  
...  

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