Oil Palm Tree Detection with High Resolution Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagery

Oil palm tree is an important cash crop in Thailand. To maximize the productivity from planting, oil palm plantation managers need to know the number of oil palm trees in the plantation area. In order to obtain this information, an approach for palm tree detection using high resolution satellite images is proposed. This approach makes it possible to count the number of oil palm trees in a plantation. The process begins with the selection of the vegetation index having the highest discriminating power between oil palm trees and background. The index having highest discriminating power is then used as the primary feature for palm tree detection. We hypothesize that oil palm trees are located at the local peak within the oil palm area. To enhance the separability between oil palm tree crowns and background, the rank transformation is applied to the index image. The local peak on the enhanced index image is then detected by using the non-maximal suppression algorithm. Since both rank transformation and non-maximal suppression are window based, semi-variogram analysis is used to determine the appropriate window size. The performance of the proposed method was tested on high resolution satellite images. In general, our approach uses produced very accurate results, e.g., about 90 percent detection rate when compared with manual labeling.