2018 International Conference on Design Innovations for 3Cs Compute Communicate Control

Tree Crown Detection and Extraction from High

Resolution Satellite Images in an Urban Area
Bhavana B L
PG Scholar, Electronics and instrumentation Engineering
Dr. Ambedkar Institute of Technology
Bengaluru-56, India Dr. Ramachandrea Hebbar
deepikasubramanyabl@gmail.com Scientist,
RRSC- South, DRDO
Bangalore- 56, India
Sridevi N hebbu@rediffmail.com
Associate Prof,Electronics and instrumentation Engineering
Dr. Ambedkar Institute of Technology
Bengaluru-56, India
Sridevee@gmail.com

Abstract— The paper presents an approach the tree crowns
detection and extraction from satellite images. The approaches
for the High resolution satellite images in urban area to separate
the Non- vegetation and Vegetation area in the images. The
NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) scheme is
applied for vegetation area detection from image. The Texture
Analysis algorithms are used for sorting out the grasslands and
trees area. The effective results maximum numbers of tree
crowns are detected from the Segmentation process
Keywords— Tree detection, NDVI, Texture Analysis, Region
Growing Segmentation.
I. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Study Area
Bangalore is the capital of the Karnataka. Bangalore is located
at 12.97degree north 77.56 degree east and total area of
1741kmsq. City becomes very famous internationally in
current years for its development in technology and fast
growth in industries. Bangalore city very famous for having
the pleasant climatic circumstances, large number lakes like
the Hebbal lake, Ulsoor lake etc and green forests and
greenery hills like a Nandi Hills hence it is called as ― India’s
Garden City. The city become rich in diversity of many things
like garden and number of unalike types of tress and lawn
presented in the large area.

The study about city is on active topic for researchers for its
research application areas. The reconstruction of building is
maturity concern for researchers as reached [1][2]. The
growing vegetation area need a detailed to illustration of urban
objects [3].The Earth having the associations between the
population of the human and element of other system
component. Investigation of vegetation types are more
important in local communication for planning the urban area,
Environment protection and measure of consistency checking
for an urban area.
Modernization of the urban vegetation type is challenges
Figure: 1. Map of vegetation and Non-vegetation of Bangalore city.
because of their nature of complexity and man-made objects in
1.2 Related Work
a large urban area. Vegetation area an extraction play very
The paper presents to analyse vegetation type in urban part
significant role in the construction of planning city, updated
from high resolution satellite imagery. The extraction,
type of goggle mapping of city, Grouping of the forest area in
delineation, detection and tree crowns classification in satellite
the urban part.
images from the researches. In paper[4][5][6] proposed the
The proposed work consists of different steps: Separation of
different methods for tree crown delineation the algorithms
Non vegetation area, vegetation area and the vegetation area
object-based method used for find top positions of the trees.
detection, segmentation of tree crown in vegetation area. The
The process to distinct forested from non-forested areas and
tree crown extraction results are presented and estimated
tree crowns, finding their species, and regroup of forest
according to accuracy of quantity of tree detected.
stands developed by methods presented in paper [7]The
algorithm valley-following is about the paper [8] region
growing methods of segmentation is in author [9].In the paper

978-1-5386-7523-6/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 8

DOI 10.1109/ICDI3C.2018.00011
[10] the crown structure is unnoticed and the coarse structure
taken into account for the surface model segmentation, and
performed the watershed transformation for the multi-scale
representation of Images. The Active Contours used to
measure the boundary of every crown. Authors in [19] the
Watershed procedure used for separates the tree-crowns and
non-wooded areas. The problem is solved in a pre-processing
step threshold technique which eliminates the non-wooded
areas.
II. PROPOSED SYSTEM
The approach is to detect and an extract the urban vegetation
indexes. The important step is Vegetation Indexes is used to
detect vegetation areas. Once vegetation areas identified, the
segmentation and Texture Analysis applied for separation of
areas into two, namely trees areas and grass and finally obtain
the tree crown. The Figure shows the proposed system block
diagram.
Figure: 2. Block diagram of the proposed system
An input is taken from the satellite data, and the colour
infrared (CIR) composite image is taken as an input. The three
bands are displayed from the image they are the green colour
indicates the band of visible red, red indicates the NIR band
and the blue indicates the band of visible green. After three
bands the image enhancing de-correlation stretch by using a
function ‘decorrstretch’. Then constructing a visible red band
and NIR band, by using the NDVI formula the vegetation area
is calculated and as a result the NDVI image is display. Then
apply Texture Analysis to separate lawn area and trees area
and Region growing Segmentation is applied to extract the
tree area.
2.1 Pre-processing of Data
In pre-processing step vegetation area detected by use NDVI
(Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) [17] algorithm
separates the non-vegetation and vegetation represented the
photosynthetic value of plants and provide pre–pixel sharing
of vegetation.
…….. (1)
Where NIR is near infrared band and R is red band values of
the pixels respectively. The vegetation area is extracted and
masks the Non vegetation area.
2.2 Segmentation of Data
Segmentation processes consist of the two steps: Texture
Analyse and Region Growing Segmentation.
A .Texture Analyse
The tree detection is done by the texture analyse method to
segregate the tree and lawn area. Texture feature is to changes
9
in value of height between adjacent pixels. The texture of
variance and mean is computed using the equation:
V= ∑ ( ) ^2// …...... (2)
M=∑ ...………………... (3)
is the value height of pixel (i, j) of image, n equals
to sliding window the pixels number and M is the value mean
of the moving window computed by the equation3.The
variance texture data was separating into lawn and treed area
values using a thresholding method.
B. Region Growing Segmentation
The method of segmentation is on basis of the region growing
approach, Where the previously detected treed area taken into
consideration. These methods consist of two stages: In this
stage, growing of seeds point individual region is detected.
During this stage, seed pixels which are grown into region
consist of all neighboring pixels are chosen arbitrarily and
satisfying similarity criterion. With the aid of region growing
method approach on geometric criteria of trees, the crown
boarders are determined. This method is centered on the
height analysis h is iteratively reduced for each step; the pixels
equivalent to a height of h ± /∆h are iteratively summed to the
neighboring region. The tree is detected is show in figure 3(h):
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The result of detection and extraction of vegetation area and
masking the Non-vegetation area obtained by the algorithm
NDVI for the area tested is in shown figure: 3(f). The result of
this unit of the system depicts the localization of areas for
urban vegetation area in urban area. The proposed method
having one deficiency the input data of image have to train
and data of images retrained when acquisition changes
condition. The computation of variance texture to vegetation
area extracted and the result of region growing segmentation
of treed areas from lawn show in fig: 3. (h).
(a)
(b)
 (h)
(c) Figure:3 .(a)Input Image,(b) CIR Image,(c)Visible Bands Images , (d) NRI v/s
Red graph (e)Near Infrared Band Image, (f) NDVI Image, (g) Segmented
Image, (h) Tress are detected image.

IV. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

The paper explains the workflow completely about detection,

extraction and the tree crown detection from urban vegetation
area from the satellite images. The first step was the
vegetation areas documentation in the urban environment,
vegetation area delineation and separating the trees area from
lawn areas. The results obtained from the segmentation have
(d)
been evaluated and the realistic capacity of geometric
description is given about the urban tree crown. The tree
structure extraction parameters such as the tree height and
crown shape of the tree and also 3D model of crown
delineation helpful for classification tree species.

REFERENCES
[1] M. Durupt and F. Taillandier, "Automatic building
reconstruction from a digital elevation model and cadastral
data: an operational approach," in Proc. of the ISPRS
Commission III Symposium on Photogrammetric and
(e)
Computer Vision. Bonn, Germany: ISPRS, 2006.
[2] C. Brenner, "Building reconstruction from images and
laser is scanning," International Journal of Applied Earth
Observation and Geo-information, vol. 6, pp. 187-198, march
2005.
[3] B.-M. Straub and C. Heipke, "Automatic extraction of
trees for 3d city models from images and height data," in
Automatic Extraction of Man Made Objects from Aerial and
Space Images, A. Gruen, E. Baltsavias, and 0. Henricsson,
Eds., vol. III, 2001, pp. 267-277.
[4] R. Pollock, "The automatic recognition of individual trees
(f) in aerial images of forests based upon a synthetic tree crown
image model," Ph.D. dissertation, University of BC,
Department of Computer Science, Vancouver, Canada, 1996.
[5] M. Larsen, "Crown modelling to find tree top positions in
aerial photographs," in Proc. of the Third Internationl
Airborne Remote Sensing Conference and Exhibition, vol. 2,
1997, pp. 428-435.
[6] G. Perrin, X. Descombes, and J. Zerubia, "2d and 3d
vegetation resource parameters assessment using marked point
processes," in Proc. of the International Conference on
Pattern Recognition, Hong-Kong, China, aug 2006.
(g) [7] F. Gougeon and D. Leckie, "Individual tree crown image
analysis - a step towards precision forestry," in Proc. ofthe
First International Precision Forestry Symposium, Seattle,
U.S., Jun 2001.

10
 [8] F. Gougeon, "A system for individual tree crown
classification of conifer stands at high spatial resolution," in
Proc. of the 17th Cananadian Symposium on Remote Sensing,
Saskatchewan, Canada, June 1995, pp. 635-642.
[9] M. Erikson, "Segmentation and classification of individual
tree crowns," Ph.D. dissertation, Swedish University of
Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden, 2004.
[10] T. Brandtberg and F. Walter, "Automatic delineation of
individual tree crowns in high spatial resolution aerial images
by multiple-scale analysis," Machine Vision and Applications,
vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 64-73, 1998.
[11] P. Horvath, I. Jermyn, Z. Kato, and J. Zerubia, "A higher-
order active contour model for tree detection," in Proc.
International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR),
Hong Kong, august 2006.
[12]A. Pinz,"Tree isolation and species classification," in
Proc. Of the International Forum on Automated Interpretation
of High Spatial Resolution Digital Imagery for Forestry, D.
Hill and D. Leckie, Eds., Victoria, British Columbia, Canada,
February 1998, pp. 127-139.
[13] M. Wulder, J. White, K. Niemann, and T. Nelson,
"Comparison of airborne and satellite high spatial resolution
data for the identification of individual trees with local
maxima filtering," International Journal of Remote Sensing,
vol. 25, no. 11, pp. 2225 - 2232, 2004.
[14] N. Paparoditis,J.-P. Souchon, G. Martinoty, and M.
Pierrot-Deseilligny, "High-end aerial digital cameras and their
impact on the automation and quality of the production
workflow," ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote
Sensing, vol. 60, pp. 400-412, sep 2006.
11
[15] S. Roy and I. Cox, "A maximum-flow formulation of the
n-camera stereo correspondence problem," in Proc. Of the
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, Bombay,
India, Jan 1998, pp. 492-499.
[16] M. Pierrot-Deseilligny and N. Paparoditis, "A multi
resolution and optimization-based image matching approach:
An application to surface reconstruction from spot5-hrs stereo
imagery," in Proc. of the ISPRS Conference Topographic
Mapping from Space (With Special Emphasis on Small
Satellites). Ankara, Turkey: ISPRS, feb 2006.
[17] P. Gong, R. Pu, G. S. Biging, and M. R. Larrieu,
"Estimation of forest leaf area index using vegetation indices
derived from Hyperion hyper spectral data," IEEE
Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, vol. 41, no.
6, pp. 1355-1362, 2003.
[18] R. Mathieu, M. Pouget, B. Cervelle, and R. Escadafal,
“Relationships between satellite based radiometric indices
simulated using laboratory reflectance data and typical soil
color of an arid environment," Remote Sensing of
Environment, vol. 66, pp. 17-28, 1998.
[19] C. Mei and S. Durrieu, "Tree crown delineation from
digital elevation models and high resolution imagery," in
Proc. of the ISPRS Workshop 'Laser scanners for Forest and
Landscape Assement', vol. 36, Fribourg, Germany, oct 2004.
[20] D. Flamanc and G. Maillet, "Evaluation of 3d city model
production from pleiades-hr images and 2d ground maps," in
URBAN, GRSSIISPRS Joint Workshop on Data Fusion and
Remote Sensing over Urban Areas, Tempe, U.S., mar 2005.