Daniel Radke

Mr. Daniel Radke

Saarland University

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

7Years (2020-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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19 November 2020 in Remote Sensing
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
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David RadkeDavid Radke
David Radke
DRDaniel Radke
Daniel Radke
JRJohn Radke
John Radke
Measuring and monitoring the height of vegetation provides important insights into forest age and habitat quality. These are essential for the accuracy of applications that are highly reliant on up-to-date and accurate vegetation data. Current vegetation sensing practices involve ground survey, photogrammetry, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and airborne light detection and ranging sensors (LiDAR). While these methods provide high resolution and accuracy, their hardware and collection effort prohibits highly recurrent and widespread collection. In response to the limitations of current methods, we designed Y-NET, a novel deep learning model to generate high resolution models of vegetation from highly recurrent multispectral aerial imagery and elevation data. Y-NET’s architecture uses convolutional layers to learn correlations between different input features and vegetation height, generating an accurate vegetation surface model (VSM) at 1×1 m resolution. We evaluated Y-NET on 235 km2 of the East San Francisco Bay Area and find that Y-NET achieves low error from LiDAR when tested on new locations. Y-NET also achieves an R2 of 0.83 and can effectively model complex vegetation through side-by-side visual comparisons. Furthermore, we show that Y-NET is able to identify instances of vegetation growth and mitigation by comparing aerial imagery and LiDAR collected at different times.