Estimating Individual Tree Height and Species from UAV Imagery
This work addresses the need for cost-effective and scalable forest biomass estimation, which is crucial for carbon sink monitoring, by providing a new benchmark and method for individual tree analysis from UAV data.
The paper tackles the problem of estimating individual tree height and species from UAV imagery by introducing BIRCH-Trees, a benchmark spanning three forest datasets, and DINOvTree, a unified approach using a Vision Foundation Model backbone. DINOvTree achieves top overall results with accurate height predictions and competitive classification accuracy while using only 54% to 58% of the parameters of the second-best approach.
Accurate estimation of forest biomass, a major carbon sink, relies heavily on tree-level traits such as height and species. Unoccupied Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) capturing high-resolution imagery from a single RGB camera offer a cost-effective and scalable approach for mapping and measuring individual trees. We introduce BIRCH-Trees, the first benchmark for individual tree height and species estimation from tree-centered UAV images, spanning three datasets: temperate forests, tropical forests, and boreal plantations. We also present DINOvTree, a unified approach using a Vision Foundation Model (VFM) backbone with task-specific heads for simultaneous height and species prediction. Through extensive evaluations on BIRCH-Trees, we compare DINOvTree against commonly used vision methods, including VFMs, as well as biological allometric equations. We find that DINOvTree achieves top overall results with accurate height predictions and competitive classification accuracy while using only 54% to 58% of the parameters of the second-best approach.