High Resolution Tree Height Mapping of the Amazon Forest using Planet NICFI Images and LiDAR-Informed U-Net Model

Fabien H Wagner; Ricardo Dalagnol; Griffin Carter; Mayumi CM Hirye; Shivraj Gill; Le Bienfaiteur Sagang Takougoum; Samuel Favrichon; Michael Keller; Jean PHB Ometto; Lorena Alves; Cynthia Creze; Stephanie P George-Chacon; Shuang Li; Zhihua Liu; Adugna Mullissa; Yan Yang; Erone G Santos; Sarah R Worden; Martin Brandt; Philippe Ciais; Stephen C Hagen; Sassan Saatchi

arXiv · 2501.10600

High Resolution Tree Height Mapping of the Amazon Forest using Planet NICFI Images and LiDAR-Informed U-Net Model

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Tree canopy height is one of the most important indicators of forest biomass, productivity, and ecosystem structure, but it is challenging to measure accurately from the ground and from space. Here, we used a U-Net model adapted for regression to map the mean tree canopy height in the Amazon forest from Planet NICFI images at ~4.78 m spatial resolution for the period 2020-2024. The U-Net model was trained using canopy height models computed from aerial LiDAR data as a reference, along with their corresponding Planet NICFI images. Predictions of tree heights on the validation sample exhibited a mean error of 3.68 m and showed relatively low systematic bias across the entire range of tree heights present in the Amazon forest. Our model successfully estimated canopy heights up to 40-50 m without much saturation, outperforming existing canopy height products from global models in this region. We determined that the Amazon forest has an average canopy height of ~22 m. Events such as logging or deforestation could be detected from changes in tree height, and encouraging results were obtained to monitor the height of regenerating forests. These findings demonstrate the potential for large-scale mapping and monitoring of tree height for old and regenerating Amazon forests using Planet NICFI imagery.

Explore related subjects

cs.CV

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Fabien H Wagner, Ricardo Dalagnol, Griffin Carter, Mayumi CM Hirye, Shivraj Gill, Le Bienfaiteur Sagang Takougoum, Samuel Favrichon, Michael Keller, Jean PHB Ometto, Lorena Alves, Cynthia Creze, Stephanie P George-Chacon, Shuang Li, Zhihua Liu, Adugna Mullissa, Yan Yang, Erone G Santos, Sarah R Worden, Martin Brandt, Philippe Ciais, Stephen C Hagen, Sassan Saatchi. 2025-01-17. High Resolution Tree Height Mapping of the Amazon Forest using Planet NICFI Images and LiDAR-Informed U-Net Model. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10600

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Tackling fluffy clouds: robust agricultural field boundary delineation from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite image time series

Accurate delineation of agricultural field boundaries is essential for effective crop monitoring and resource management. However, competing methodologies often face significant challenges, particularly in their reliance on extensive manual efforts for cloud-free data curation and limited adaptability to diverse global conditions. In this paper, we introduce PTAViT3D, a deep learning architecture specifically designed for processing three-dimensional time series of satellite imagery from either Sentinel-1 (S1) or Sentinel-2 (S2). Additionally, we present PTAViT3D-CA, an extension of the PTAViT3D model incorporating cross-attention mechanisms to fuse S1 and S2 datasets, enhancing robustness in cloud-contaminated scenarios. The proposed methods leverage spatio-temporal correlations through a memory-efficient 3D Vision Transformer architecture, facilitating accurate boundary delineation directly from preprocessed, cloud-affected imagery. We comprehensively validate our models through extensive testing on various datasets, including Australia's ePaddocks - CSIRO's national, continental-scale agricultural field boundary product covering Australia's cropping regions - alongside public benchmarks Fields-of-the-World, PASTIS, and AI4SmallFarms. Our results consistently demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, highlighting excellent global transferability and robustness. Crucially, our approach significantly simplifies data preparation workflows by reliably processing cloud-affected imagery, thereby offering strong adaptability across diverse agricultural environments. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/feevos/tfcl.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Copy-Move Forgery Detection and Question Answering for Remote Sensing Image

Driven by practical demands in land resource monitoring and national defense security, this paper introduces the Remote Sensing Copy-Move Question Answering (RSCMQA) task. Unlike traditional Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering (RSVQA), RSCMQA focuses on interpreting complex tampering scenarios and inferring relationships between objects. We present a suite of global RSCMQA datasets, comprising images from 29 different regions across 14 countries. Specifically, we propose five distinct datasets, including the basic dataset RS-CMQA, the category-balanced dataset RS-CMQA-B, the high-authenticity dataset Real-RSCM, the extended dataset RS-TQA, and the extended category-balanced dataset RS-TQA-B. These datasets fill a critical gap in the field while ensuring comprehensiveness, balance, and challenging scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce a region-discrimination-guided multimodal copy-move forgery perception framework (CMFPF), which enhances the accuracy of answering questions about tampered images by leveraging prompts about the differences and connections between the source and tampered regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method establishes a stronger benchmark for RSCMQA compared to general VQA and RSVQA models. Our datasets and code are publicly available at https://github.com/shenyedepisa/RSCMQA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SMDDFNet: State-space Modeling and Dynamic Dual Fusion Network for Traffic Sign Detection

Traffic sign detection is a challenging visual signal processing task for advanced driver assistance, where small objects, scale variation, and occlusion limit conventional detectors with fixed receptive fields. This paper proposes State-space Modeling and Dynamic Dual Fusion Network (SMDDFNet), a deep learning detector for traffic sign images. SMDDFNet integrates a Dynamic Dual Fusion (DDF) module and a state-space modeling backbone to enhance multi-scale feature representation. DDF combines efficient multi-scale attention with content-aware dynamic filtering in the frequency domain, while the backbone captures long-range dependencies with linear computational complexity. A multi-scale feature fusion neck further aggregates pyramid features for robust localization of small signs. Experiments on TT100K, GTSDB, PASCAL VOC, and the Roboflow~100 \emph{vehicle} subset show that SMDDFNet achieves competitive accuracy against recent detectors while retaining real-time throughput. The source code is available at https://github.com/rainbowyuyu/SMDDFNet

cs.CV↗