Tree Localization and Monitoring on Autonomous Drones employing Deep Learning

Forest management relies on the analysis of satellite imagery and time intensive physical on-site inspections. Both methods are costly and time consuming. Satellite based images are often not updated in a sufficient frequency to react to infestations or other occurring problems. Forest management benefits greatly from accurate and recent information about the local forest areas. In order to react appropriately and in time to incidents such as areas damaged by storms, areas infested by bark beetles and decaying ground water level, this information can be extracted from high resolution imagery. In this work, we propose UAVs to meet this demand and demonstrate that they are fully capable of gathering this information in a cost efficient way. Our work focuses on the cartography of trees to optimize forest-operation. We apply deep learning for image processing as a method to identify and isolate individual trees for GPS tagging and add some additional information such as height and diameter.