Title
Estimation of Forest Leaf Area Index Using Height and Canopy Cover Information Extracted From Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Stereo Imagery
Abstract
Leaf area index (LAI) is an important forest structural parameter in the process of photosynthesis. Most studies have investigated the estimation of forest LAI using the spectral information of optical remote sensing images or the height information from LiDAR data. This paper explored the estimation of forest LAI using canopy cover and forest height information extracted from stereo imagery acquired by cameras onboard an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). UAV remote sensing has gradually become practical in recent years. Two alternative methods were proposed to extract forest height information. The height indices method extracted forest height indices within each forest plot based on the vertical histogram of the canopy height model derived from stereo imagery, while the segmentation method characterized forest plots using tree numbers and average tree heights based on the individual tree segmentation. The results showed that canopy cover and forest height are complementary in the estimation of forest LAI no matter what method was used. The combined use of canopy cover and forest height information extracted by the segmentation method had a better estimation accuracy of forest LAI with <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">R</italic> <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> = 0.833 and RMSE = 0.288. This paper demonstrated a new approach to predict forest LAI using UAV optical images.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/JSTARS.2019.2891519
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
Keywords
Field
DocType
Forestry,Vegetation,Unmanned aerial vehicles,Laser radar,Data mining,Three-dimensional displays,Remote sensing
Histogram,Leaf area index,Vegetation,Segmentation,Remote sensing,Mean squared error,Lidar,Forest plot,Mathematics,Canopy
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
12
2
1939-1404
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dafeng Zhang100.68
Jianli Liu201.35
Wenjian Ni33213.56
Guoqing Sun416249.24
Zhiyu Zhang54113.64
Qinhuo Liu628085.97
Qiang Wang700.34