A New Approach for Feeding Multispectral Imagery into Convolutional Neural Networks Improved Classification of Seedlings

Tree species information is important for forest management, especially in seedling stands. To mitigate the spectral admixture of understory reflectance with small and lesser foliaged seedling canopies, we proposed an image pre-processing step based on the canopy threshold (C-th) applied on drone-based multispectral images prior to feeding classifiers. This study focused on (1) improving the classification of seedlings by applying the introduced technique; (2) comparing the classification accuracies of the convolutional neural network (CNN) and random forest (RF) methods; and (3) improving classification accuracy by fusing vegetation indices to multispectral data. A classification of 5417 field-located seedlings from 75 sample plots showed that applying the C-th technique improved the overall accuracy (OA) of species classification from 75.7% to 78.5% on the C-th-affected subset of the test dataset in CNN method (1). The OA was more accurate in CNN (79.9%) compared to RF (68.3%) (2). Moreover, fusing vegetation indices with multispectral data improved the OA from 75.1% to 79.3% in CNN (3). Further analysis revealed that shorter seedlings and tensors with a higher proportion of C-th-affected pixels have negative impacts on the OA in seedling forests. Based on the obtained results, the proposed method could be used to improve species classification of single-tree detected seedlings in operational forest inventory.