An FPGA-based tree crown detection approach for remote sensing images

The on-board data processing for remote sensing images is a popular research issue in recent years. The higher data acquisition speed and the limited power budget of satellite increases the challenges of large-scale remote sensing image processing. This paper proposes a high performance tree crown detection approach for large-scale remote sensing images on FPGAs. A pipelined-friendly and resource-economic tree crown detection algorithm (PF-TCD) is designed through reconstructing and modifying the workflow of the original algorithm. Our proposed PF-TCD obtains 18.75 times speedup for a large-scale real-world remote sensing image compared with a fully-optimized software implementation of the original algorithm on an Intel 12- core CPU.