A multi-scale approach for delineating individual tree crowns with very high resolution imagery

This paper presents a multi-scale approach for delineating individual tree crowns (ITC) from high spatial resolution imagery. By analyzing the evolution of image gradients over the scale-space constructed with orthogonal wavelets, tree crown boundaries are effectively strengthened while the textures resulted from tree branches and twigs are largely suppressed. Two scale consistency checks, a scale and a geometric consistency check, were devised to account for tree crown's radiometric and geometric characteristic. After an edge-enhanced image was acquired, a previously developed marker-controlled watershed segmentation method was adopted to delineate ITC. An experiment was carried out in a study site in California. Field measurements of crown size of 58 trees were compared with those derived from aerial imagery. An R square value of 0.68 was achieved. It was found that crown size was underestimated from the photo interpretation compared to that from the ground survey. The result can be attributed to the fact that pixels lying on the tree crown boundaries are poorly represented in the image.