Interactive Basal Area Estimations from Mobile Phone Images

The overall objective of the Social Forest Planning project is to develop and demonstrate a novel system for forest management planning and updating of present plans. The system to be developed combines images from cellular phones with remote sensing data to predict forest variables. The variables are input to a Planner Engine that outputs forest resources information for every forest stand and feeds them into a Geographical Information System (GIS). The GPS location tag in the images makes it possible to use them easily as in-situ reference data. The main technical development goal of Social Forest is to develop automatic and interactive methods for the cell phone image analysis. The automatic methods were presented in Remote Sensing Days 2010 [2]. This paper focuses on interactive delineation of tree stems, that enables automatic computation of tree stem basal area [m2/ha], the key variable in the estimation of the growing stock volume.