Trees of green: constructing panels of tree canopy from aerial imagery

Alba Miñano-Mañero

No 2024/0352, Working Papers REM from ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, REM, Universidade de Lisboa

Abstract: This paper develops a fully-automated workflow for constructing panels of tree canopy from high-resolution multispectral imagery with limited near-infrared (NIR) training data. The proposed workflow utilizes the tree-pixel detection algorithm developed by Yang,Wu, Praun, and Ma (2009) and Bosch (2020) on a large set of U.S. urban areas but modifies it by creating automatic ground-truth masks through various visual graphics techniques that leverage modern high-resolution NIR data. By matching colors across different imagery periods, the workflow predicts tree presence in older images without NIR data, using the recent images with NIR data. Using a subset of cities that represent the different U.S. climate regions, I quantify the effectiveness of the workflow by implementing the algorithm without pre-processing in the creation of ground-truth masks, without equalizing colors across periods, and using a universal model for all areas. The comparison shows that my workflow is the option that leads to better results in terms of accuracy, recall, and precision.

Keywords: aerial imagery; tree detection; near-infrared light; panel data. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://rem.rc.iseg.ulisboa.pt/wps/pdf/REM_WP_0352_2024.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ise:remwps:wp03522024

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers REM from ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, REM, Universidade de Lisboa ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, REM, R. Miguel Lupi, 20, LISBON, PORTUGAL.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sandra Araújo ().