Individual tree detection and counting based on high-resolution imagery and the canopy height model data

Individual Tree Detection-and-Counting (ITDC) is among the important tasks in town areas, and numerous methods are proposed in this direction. Despite their many advantages, still, the proposed methods are inadequate to provide robust results because they mostly rely on the direct field investigations. This paper presents a novel approach involving high-resolution imagery and the Canopy-Height-Model (CHM) data to solve the ITDC problem. The new approach is studied in six urban scenes: farmland, woodland, park, industrial land, road and residential areas. First, it identifies tree canopy regions using a deep learning network from high-resolution imagery. It then deploys the CHM-data to detect treetops of the canopy regions using a local maximum algorithm and individual tree canopies using the region growing. Finally, it calculates and describes the number of individual trees and tree canopies. The proposed approach is experimented with the data from Shanghai, China. Our results show that the individual tree detection method had an average overall accuracy of 0.953, with a precision of 0.987 for woodland scene. Meanwhile, the R² value for canopy segmentation in different urban scenes is greater than 0.780 and 0.779 for canopy area and diameter size, respectively. These results confirm that the proposed method is robust enough for urban tree planning and management.