Forestry Applications of High Resolution Imagery

In this paper a possible chain for the processing and interpretation of high resolution imagery is presented. It starts from the basic geometric and radiometric processing of the images and ends at the numerical interpretation approaches. With a spatial resolution of few meters new problems in the image analysis process are encountered. First, many images have to be combined into mosaics. Second, traditional pixel by pixel approaches in the interpretation are not successful when the neighbouring pixels represent tree crowns and the shaded space between the crowns. A test example is shown using airborne digital high resolution imagery. It was possible to create high quality mosaics automatically using more than a hundred images. The combination of textural information with spectral information in the image interpretation seemed to be a sound base for further research.