Abstract

High resolution aerial and satellite images of forests have a key role to play in natural resource management. As they enable forestry managers to study forests at the scale of trees, it is now possible to get a more accurate evaluation of the resources. Automatic algorithms are needed in that prospect to assist human operators in the exploitation of these data.

In this demo, we present a stochastic geometry approach to extract 2D and 3D parameters of the trees, by modelling the stands as some realizations of a marked point process of ellipses or ellipsoids, whose points are the locations of the trees and marks their geometric features. As a result we obtain the number of stems, their position, and their size. This approach yields an energy minimization problem, where the energy embeds a regularization term (prior density), which introduces some interactions between the objects, and a data term, which links the objects to the features to be extracted, in 2D and 3D. Results are shown on Colour Infrared aerial images provided by the French Forest Inventory (IFN).