Leonidas Alagialoglou (recipient of three LASmoons)
Multimedia Understanding Group, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Thessaloniki, GREECE
Background:
Canopy height is a fundamental geometric tree parameter in supporting sustainable forest management. Apart from the standard height measurement method using LiDAR instruments, other airborne measurement techniques, such as very high-resolution passive airborne imaging, have also shown to provide accurate estimations. However, both methods suffer from high cost and cannot be regularly repeated.
Goal:
In our study, we attempt to substitute airborne measurements with widely available satellite imagery. In addition to spatial and spectral correlations of a single-shot image, we seek to exploit temporal correlations of sequential lower resolution imagery. For this we use a convolutional variant of a recurrent neural network based model for estimating canopy height, based on a temporal sequence of Sentinel-2 images. Our model’s performance using sequential space borne imagery is shown to outperform the compared state-of-the-art methods based on costly airborne single-shot images as well as satellite images.
Data:
The experimental study area of approximately 940 squared km is includes two national parks, Bavarian Forest National Park and Šumava National Park, which are located at the border between Germany and Czech Republic. LiDAR measurements of the area from 2017 and 2019 will be used as ground truth height measurements that have been provided by the national park’s authorities. Temporal sequences of Sentinel-2 imagery will be acquired from the Copernicus hub for canopy height estimation.
LAStools processing:
Accurate conversion of LAS files into DEM and DSM in order to acquire ground truth canopy height model.
1) Remove noise [lasthin, lasnoise]
2) Classify points into ground and non-ground [lasground, lasground_new]
3) Create DTMs and DSMs [lasthin, las2dem]