Multiscale Tree Analysis from Satellite Images

As satellite images cover wide areas and obtaining them has become easier, using these images in agriculture has become an important research area. Especially, satellite images can be used in seasonal crop estimation. In this study, we focused on crop estimation from trees. The boundary of a tree is proportional to its age which gives information on the approximate crop that can be obtained from it. Obtaining the number of trees in a region, with the size of each tree, gives the approximate amount of crop that can be harvested from that region. In this study, we propose a method based on multiple filtering, watershed segmentation, and Otsu thresholding to detect trees and their boundaries. To test the proposed method, we picked three satellite images containing 6928 trees. These trees have diameters between 2 to 30 pixels. We compared the proposed method with two other methods in the literature. We summarized the obtained results in this study.