Detection of the Pine Trees Damaged by Pine Wilt Disease Using High Spatial Remote Sensing Data

Since 1988 pine wilt disease has spread over rapidly in Korea. It is not easy to detect the damaged pine trees by pine wilt disease from conventional remote sensing skills. Thus, many possibilities were investigated to detect the damaged pines using various kinds of remote sensing data including high spatial resolution satellite image of 2000/2003 IKONOS and 2005 QuickBird, aerial photos, and digital airborne data, too. Time series of B&W aerial photos at the scale of 1:6,000 were used to validate the results. A local maximum filtering was adapted to determine whether the damaged pines could be detected or not at the tree level from high resolution satellite images, and to locate the damaged trees. Several enhancement methods such as NDVI and image transformations were examined to find out the optimal detection method. Considering the mean crown radius of pine trees, local maximum filter with 3 pixels in radius was adapted to detect the damaged trees on IKONOS image. CIR images of 50cm resolution were taken by PKNU-3 (REDLAKE MS4000) sensor. The simulated CIR images with resolutions of 1m, 2m, and 4m were generated to test the possibility of tree detection both in a stereo and a single mode. In conclusion, in order to detect the pine tree damaged by pine wilt disease at a tree level from satellite image, a spatial resolution might be less than 1m in a single mode and/or 1m in a stereo mode.