The suitability of future high-resolution satellite imagery for forest inventory

Within a year or two, the first non-military high-resolution imaging satellites will be in orbit. Data from such satellites looks very promising for forest mapping in heterogeneous forest with small stands, like the Norwegian forests. The experiment presented in this article has tested how suitable such data may be for forest mapping. Aerial imagery has been digitized and converted to panchromatic and three-band multispectral data. Such data sets have been generated for five configurations of panchromatic and multispectral resolutions. Spectral and textural features have been extracted from each data set and classified into a selected subset of classes of interest in forestry. The results show that high-resolution data increases the performance of the classification significantly. There was a 16% reduction in the total error rate when the resolution was increased from 15 m panchromatic/30 m multispectral to 1 m panchromatic/4 m multispectral.