SEGMENTATION OF SINGLE STANDING DEAD TREES IN HIGH-RESOLUTION AERIAL IMAGERY WITH GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK-BASED SHAPE PRIORS

Autor: P. Polewski, J. Shelton, W. Yao, M. Heurich
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XLIII-B2-2020, Pp 717-723 (2020)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1682-1750
2194-9034
DOI: 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIII-B2-2020-717-2020
Popis: The use of multispectral imagery for monitoring biodiversity in ecosystems is becoming widespread. A key parameter of forest ecosystems is the distribution of dead wood. This work addresses the segmentation of individual dead tree crowns in nadir-view aerial infrared imagery. While dead vegetation produces a distinct spectral response in the near infrared band, separating adjacent trees within large swaths of dead stands remains a challenge. We tackle this problem by casting the segmentation task within the active contour framework, a mathematical formulation combining learned models of the object’s shape and appearance as prior information. We explore the use of a deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN) in the role of the shape model, replacing the original linear mixture-of-eigenshapes formulation. Also, we rely on probabilities obtained from a deep fully convolutional network (FCN) as the appearance prior. Experiments conducted on manually labeled reference polygons show that the DCGAN is able to learn a low-dimensional manifold of tree crown shapes, outperforming the eigenshape model with respect to the similarity of the reproduced and referenced shapes on about 45 % of the test samples. The DCGAN is successful mostly for less convex shapes, whereas the baseline remains superior for more regular tree crown polygons.
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