Spatial coordinates correction based on multi-sensor low-altitude remote sensing image registration for monitoring forest dynamics

Tree species diversity plays a significant role in our ecosystem. In order to monitor forest dynamics, hyperspectral remote sensing equipped on a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is commonly applied, such as individual tree detection and classification. However, low resolution, positioning errors and the imaging perspective of small UAV affected by wind speed/direction, complex terrain, battery capacity, aircraft posture, flying height and other human factors result in relatively large positional errors (i.e., GPS errors) in such hyperspectral images, and the precise forest dynamics monitoring is limited, especially in spatial analysis. In order to reduce the positional errors of hyperspectral images captured from a small UAV and provide a precise forest dynamics monitoring, we present a novel spatial coordinates correction approach by registering low-altitude UAV visible light and hyperspectral images. The proposed method first employs visible light images and ground control points to stitch a geographic coordinate system as our groundtruth. Hyperspectral images (UHI) are then registered onto the stitched visible light image (UVI) via a novel image registration method. Finally, spatial coordinates of the registered hyperspectral images are updated by using the aforementioned groundtruth. Extensive experiments on image registration and spatial coordinates correction demonstrate the favorable performance of our method. Compared against four state-of-the-art registration methods, our method shows the best registration performance, and the positional errors of hyperspectral images are significantly reduced. Such accuracy is considered very high in this research.