Tree crown detection in high resolution optical images during the early growth stages of eucalyptus plantations in Brazil

International audienceIndividual tree detection methods are more and more present, and improve, in forestry and silviculture domains with the increasing availability of satellite metric imagery. Automatic detection on these very high spatial resolution images aims to determine the tree positions and crown sizes. In this paper, we used a mathematical model based on marked point processes, which showed advantages w.r.t. several individual tree detection algorithms for plantations, to analyze the eucalyptus plantations in Brazil, with 2 optical images acquired by the WorldView-2 satellite. A tentative detection simultaneously with 2 images of different dates (multi-date) was tested for the first time, which estimates individual tree crown variation during these dates. The relevance of detection was discussed considering the detection performance in tree localizations and crown sizes. Then, tree crown growth was deduced from detection results and compared with the expected dynamics of corresponding populations