Keywords

Airborne remote sensing, Data alignment, Species classification, Crown segmentation, National ecological observatory network, Crown delineation, Remote sensing, Data science competition, Multilayer perceptron

Abstract

To accelerate scientific progress on remote tree classification—as well as biodiversity and ecology sampling—The National Institute of Science and Technology created a community-based competition where scientists were invited to contribute informatics methods for classifying tree species and genus using crown-level images of trees. We classified tree species and genus at the pixel level using hyperspectral and LiDAR observations. We compared three algorithms that have been implemented extensively across a broad range of research applications: support vector machines, random forests, and multilayer perceptron. At the pixel level, the multilayer perceptron algorithm classified species or genus with high accuracy (92.7% and 95.9%, respectively) on the training data and performed better than the other two algorithms (85.8–93.5%). This indicates promise for the use of the multilayer perceptron (MLP) algorithm for tree-species classification based on hyperspectral and LiDAR observations and coincides with a growing body of research in which neural network-based algorithms outperform other types of classification algorithm for machine vision. To aggregate patterns across the images, we used an ensemble approach that averages the pixel-level outputs of the MLP algorithm to classify species at the crown level. The average accuracy of these classifications on the test set was 68.8% for the nine species.

Original Publication Citation

Sumsion GR†, Bradshaw MS†, Hill KT†, Pinto LDG†, Piccolo SR*. Remote sensing tree classification with a multilayer perceptron. PeerJ, 2019 Feb 28;7:e6101. eCollection 2019

Document Type

Peer-Reviewed Article

Publication Date

2019-02-28

Publisher

PeerJ

Language

English

College

Life Sciences

Department

Biology

University Standing at Time of Publication

Associate Professor

Included in

Biology Commons

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