Intergration of High Resolution Aerial Images and Airborne Lidar Data for Forest Delineation

Forest boundary is one of the important parameters in Swiss National Forest Inventory (NFI). It is mainly delineated by aerial photo interpretation according to the defined “Forest/Non-forest decision” rules at each sample plot. However, it is not suitable for local assessment of forest stands with such kind of coarse grid sampling design. This paper presents an approach intending to delineate forest boundary automatically by integrating use of aerial images and airborne LIDAR. Empirical tests show that the proposed method offers an automatic process of forest boundary detection for various aerial images in a promising way. However, it’s a challenge task to describe NFI forest /non-forest definition with automatic computer-based method and current study provides an encouraging basic for further development and testing.