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Efficient Framework for Palm Tree Detection in UAV Images

Article  in  IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing · December 2014
DOI: 10.1109/JSTARS.2014.2331425

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4692 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 7, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2014
Efficient Framework for Palm Tree Detection
in UAV Images
Salim Malek, IEEE Member, Yakoub Bazi, Senior Member, IEEE, Naif Alajlan, Senior Member, IEEE,
Haikel AlHichri, IEEE Member, and Farid Melgani, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—The latest developments in unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs) and associated sensing systems make these platforms
increasingly attractive to the remote sensing community. The
large amount of spatial details contained in these images opens
the door for advanced monitoring applications. In this paper, we
use this cost-effective and attractive technology for the automatic
detection of palm trees. Given a UAV image acquired over a palm
farm, first we extract a set of keypoints using the Scale-invariant
Feature Transform (SIFT). Then, we analyze these keypoints with
an extreme learning machine (ELM) classifier a priori trained
on a set of palm and no-palm keypoints. As output, the ELM
classifier will mark each detected palm tree by several keypoints.
Then, in order to capture the shape of each tree, we propose
to merge these keypoints with an active contour method based
on level sets (LSs). Finally, we further analyze the texture of
the regions obtained by LS with local binary patterns (LBPs)
to distinguish palm trees from other vegetations. Experimental
results obtained on UAV images with 3.5 cm of spatial resolution
and acquired over two different farms confirm the promising
capabilities of the proposed framework.
Index Terms—Extreme learning machine (ELM), level set (LS),
local binary pattern (LBP), palm trees, scale-invariant feature
transform (SIFT), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images.
I. I NTRODUCTION
I N RECENT years, very high resolution (VHR) images
with spatial resolutions less than 1 m are constantly
acquired over the earth surface by VHR satellites such as
GeoEye-1 and Worldview-2. The advent of this type of im-
agery opened the door for new applications such as counting
roofless buildings [1], object tracking and identification [2],
[3], quantifying bird migration [4], and automated detection
of buildings [5].
Besides VHR satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
are also increasingly adopted by the remote sensing commu-
nity as new effective acquisition systems. For a long time,
UAVs were used exclusively for military applications, but due
Manuscript received April 01, 2014; accepted June 05, 2014. Date of
publication August 20, 2014; date of current version January 21, 2015.
This work was supported by NSTIP strategic technologies programs under
10-SPA1192-02 in Saudi Arabia.
S. Malek is with Department of Electronic, Saad Dahleb University, Blida,
Algeria (e-mail: smalek@ksu.edu.sa).
Y. Bazi, N. Alajlan, and H. AlHichri are with ALISR Laboratory,
College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University,
Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia (e-mail: ybazi@ksu.edu.sa; najlan@ksu.edu.sa;
hhichri@ksu.edu.sa).
F. Melgani is with the Department of Information Engineering and Compu-
ter Science, University of Trento, I-38123 Trento, Italy (e-mail: melgani@disi.
unitn.it).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSTARS.2014.2331425
1939-1404 © 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
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to advancement in technologies and reduction in prices, UAVs
became a practical solution for many civilian applications
such as vegetation monitoring [6], [7] anomaly detection in
archeological sites [8], precision farming [10]–[12], and car
counting [13]. The high flexibility in the use of small UAV sys-
tems permits immediate intervention and interactive measure-
ments according to customer’s specific needs. In fact, UAVs:
1) allow mapping and monitoring small areas at extremely fine
scales (up to 1 cm); 2) can reach the desired point of obser-
vation in just few minutes; and 3) allow multitemporal acqui-
sitions over the same area at predefined and desired times.
However, on the other hand the UAV images introduce extra
challenges compared to VHR satellite images as they are char-
acterized by improved spatial resolutions making traditional
remote sensing image analysis methods not well adapted.
In this paper, we propose to exploit this technology for
detecting date palm trees in farms situated in the kingdom
of Saudi Arabia. The interest in obtaining such information
is explained by several reasons. First, the date palm is one
of the most important crops in the Kingdom as the country
accounts around 23 millions of trees [14]. Second, it provides
an inventory of the trees that may help in a better planning of
the irrigation process. Third, the information about the exact
number of trees is essential for predicting the date production.
Finally, the number of trees is used as a fundamental criterion
for obtaining public grants. Usually, the process of counting
palm trees is carried out manually on site. Such an operation
is very tedious and time-consuming. Therefore, the utilization
of automatic methods represents for the public and private
agricultural institutions a potentially interesting alternative.
From a methodological point of view, we present in this
paper an automatic framework composed of four main phases.
Given a UAV image acquired over a palm farm, we first extract
a set of candidate keypoints using the Scale-invariant Feature
Transform (SIFT) [15]. Then, we analyze these keypoints with
a recent kernel-based classification method termed as extreme
learning machine (ELM) [16]–[18]. This last is a priori trained
on palm and no-palm keypoints extracted by SIFT from a
set of a palm and no-palm training templates. As output, the
ELM classifier will mark each detected palm tree by several
keypoints. Then, in order to capture the shape of each tree,
we propose to merge these keypoints with an active contour
method based on level sets (LSs). Because of the keypoints
incorrectly classified by ELM as palm, side effects could
appear at the end of the grouping process such as merging very
close trees and the creation of regions related to other green
vegetation. To this end, we introduce processing operations