Estimating Forest Canopy Height with Multi-Spectral and Multi-Temporal Imagery Using Deep Learning

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Canopy height is a vital indicator to asses carbon uptake and productivity of forests. However, precise measurements, such as from airborne or spaceborne 3D laser scanning (LiDAR), are expensive and usually cover only small areas. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning model that can generate detailed maps of tree canopy heights. In contrast to previous approaches that use a single image as input, we process multi-temporal data via a an adaptation of the popular U-Net architecture that is based on the EfficientNet and 3D convolution operators. To that end, our model receives multi-spectral Landsat satellite imagery as input and can predict continuous height maps. As labeled data, we resort to spatially sparse LiDAR data from ICESat-2. Thus, with such a model, one can produce dense canopy height maps given only multi-spectral Landsat data. Our experimental evaluation shows that our our model outperforms existing and improved single-temporal models. To test generalizability, we created a non-overlapping dataset to evaluate our approach and further tested the model performance on out-of-distribution data. The results show that our model can successfully learn drastic changes in distribution.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2021
EditorsYixin Chen, Heiko Ludwig, Yicheng Tu, Usama Fayyad, Xingquan Zhu, Xiaohua Tony Hu, Suren Byna, Xiong Liu, Jianping Zhang, Shirui Pan, Vagelis Papalexakis, Jianwu Wang, Alfredo Cuzzocrea, Carlos Ordonez
Number of pages10
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Publication date2021
Pages4915-4924
ISBN (Electronic)9781665439022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Event2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2021 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: 15 Dec 202118 Dec 2021

Conference

Conference2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2021
LandUnited States
ByVirtual, Online
Periode15/12/202118/12/2021
SponsorAnkura Collaboration Drives Results, IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, Lyve Cloud, NSF, Seagate

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 IEEE.

    Research areas

  • Canopy Height Prediction, ICESat-2, Landsat, Neural Networks, Spatio-Temporal Data

ID: 306680480