Detecting Pest-Infested Forest Damage through Multispectral Satellite Imagery and Improved UNet+.

Abstract

Plant pests are the primary biological threats to agricultural and forestry production as well as forest ecosystem. Monitoring forest-pest damage via satellite images is crucial for the development of prevention and control strategies. Previous studies utilizing deep learning to monitor pest-infested damage in satellite imagery adopted RGB images, while multispectral imagery and vegetation indices were not used. Multispectral images and vegetation indices contain a wealth of useful information for detecting plant health, which can improve the precision of pest damage detection. The aim of the study is to further improve forest-pest infestation area segmentation by combining multispectral, vegetation indices and RGB information into deep learning. We also propose a new image segmentation method based on UNet++ with attention mechanism module for detecting forest damage induced by bark beetle and aspen leaf miner in Sentinel-2 images. The ResNeSt101 is used as the feature extraction backbone, and the attention mechanism scSE module is introduced in the decoding phase for improving the image segmentation results. We used Sentinel-2 imagery to produce a dataset based on forest health damage data gathered by the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development (FLNRORD) in British Columbia (BC), Canada, during aerial overview surveys (AOS) in 2020. The dataset contains the 11 original Sentinel-2 bands and 13 vegetation indices. The experimental results confirmed that the significance of vegetation indices and multispectral data in enhancing the segmentation effect. The results demonstrated that the proposed method exhibits better segmentation quality and more accurate quantitative indices with overall accuracy of 85.11%, in comparison with the state-of-the-art pest area segmentation methods.

Plant phenotyping relevance

マルチスペクトル衛星画像と植生指数から森林の害虫被害状態・被害面積を抽出する画像分割手法を開発し、データセットと定量評価を提示しており、植物状態の取得方法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper describes a Sentinel-2 based pest-damage segmentation dataset and RSPR-UNet++ model, but the Data Availability Statement explicitly says data sharing is not applicable, and no public code, dataset, or model URL is provided. Sentinel-2 imagery and FLNRORD labels are third-party sources, not paper-specific de-

No evidence-backed public reproduction asset is currently recorded.