The amount of scientific literature on (Geographic) Object-based Image Analysis – GEOBIA has been and still is sharply increasing. These approaches to analysing imagery have antecedents in earlier research on image segmentation and use GIS-like spatial analysis within classification and feature extraction approaches. This article investigates these development and its implications and asks whether or not this is a new paradigm in remote sensing and Geographic Information Science (GIScience). We first discuss several limitations of prevailing per-pixel methods when applied to high resolution images. Then we explore the paradigm concept developed by Kuhn (1962) and discuss whether GEOBIA can be regarded as a paradigm according to this definition. We crystallize core concepts of GEOBIA, including the role of objects, of ontologies and the multiplicity of scales and we discuss how these conceptual developments support important methods in remote sensing such as change detection and accuracy assessment. The ramifications of the different theoretical foundations between the ‘per-pixel paradigm’ and GEOBIA are analysed, as are some of the challenges along this path from pixels, to objects, to geo-intelligence. Based on several paradigm indications as defined by Kuhn and based on an analysis of peer-reviewed scientific literature we conclude that GEOBIA is a new and evolving paradigm.

Detection and classification of tree species from remote sensing data were performed using mainly multispectral and hyperspectral images and Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) data. Despite the comparatively lower cost and higher spatial resolution, few studies focused on images captured by Red-Green-Blue (RGB) sensors. Besides, the recent years have witnessed an impressive progress of deep learning methods for object detection. Motivated by this scenario, we proposed and evaluated the usage of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based methods combined with Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) high spatial resolution RGB imagery for the detection of law protected tree species. Three state-of-the-art object detection methods were evaluated: Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster R-CNN), YOLOv3 and RetinaNet. A dataset was built to assess the selected methods, comprising 392 RBG images captured from August 2018 to February 2019, over a forested urban area in midwest Brazil. The target object is an important tree species threatened by extinction known as Dipteryx alata Vogel (Fabaceae). The experimental analysis delivered average precision around 92% with an associated processing times below 30 miliseconds.

The classification of tree species can significantly benefit from high spatial and spectral information acquired by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) associated with advanced classification methods. This study investigated the following topics concerning the classification of 16 tree species in two subtropical forest fragments of Southern Brazil: i) the potential integration of UAV-borne hyperspectral images with 3D information derived from their photogrammetric point cloud (PPC); ii) the performance of two machine learning methods (support vector machine – SVM and random forest – RF) when employing different datasets at a pixel and individual tree crown (ITC) levels; iii) the potential of two methods for dealing with the imbalanced sample set problem: a new weighted SVM (wSVM) approach, which attributes different weights to each sample and class, and a deep learning classifier (convolutional neural network – CNN), associated with a previous step to balance the sample set; and finally, iv) the potential of this last classifier for tree species classification as compared to the above mentioned machine learning methods. Results showed that the inclusion of the PPC features to the hyperspectral data provided a great accuracy increase in tree species classification results when conventional machine learning methods were applied, between 13 and 17% depending on the classifier and the study area characteristics. When using the PPC features and the canopy height model (CHM), associated with the majority vote (MV) rule, the SVM, wSVM and RF classifiers reached accuracies similar to the CNN, which outperformed these classifiers for both areas when considering the pixel-based classifications (overall accuracy of 84.4% in Area 1, and 74.95% in Area 2). The CNN was between 22% and 26% more accurate than the SVM and RF when only the hyperspectral bands were employed. The wSVM provided a slight increase in accuracy not only for some lesser represented classes, but also some major classes in Area 2. While conventional machine learning methods are faster, they demonstrated to be less stable to changes in datasets, depending on prior segmentation and hand-engineered features to reach similar accuracies to those attained by the CNN. To date, CNNs have been barely explored for the classification of tree species, and CNN-based classifications in the literature have not dealt with hyperspectral data specifically focusing on tropical environments. This paper thus presents innovative strategies for classifying tree species in subtropical forest areas at a refined legend level, integrating UAV-borne 2D hyperspectral and 3D photogrammetric data and relying on both deep and conventional machine learning approaches.

This study proposes and evaluates five deep fully convolutional networks (FCNs) for the semantic segmentation of a single tree species: SegNet, U-Net, FC-DenseNet, and two DeepLabv3+ variants. The performance of the FCN designs is evaluated experimentally in terms of classification accuracy and computational load. We also verify the benefits of fully connected conditional random fields (CRFs) as a post-processing step to improve the segmentation maps. The analysis is conducted on a set of images captured by an RGB camera aboard a UAV flying over an urban area. The dataset also contains a mask that indicates the occurrence of an endangered species called Dipteryx alata Vogel, also known as cumbaru, taken as the species to be identified. The experimental analysis shows the effectiveness of each design and reports average overall accuracy ranging from 88.9% to 96.7%, an F1-score between 87.0% and 96.1%, and IoU from 77.1% to 92.5%. We also realize that CRF consistently improves the performance, but at a high computational cost.

Deforestation is one of the major threats to natural ecosystems. This process has a substantial contribution to climate change and biodiversity reduction. Therefore, the monitoring and early detection of deforestation is an essential process for preservation. Techniques based on satellite images are among the most attractive options for this application. However, many approaches involve some human intervention or are dependent on a manually selected threshold to identify regions that suffer deforestation. Motivated by this scenario, the present work evaluates Deep Learning-based strategies for automatic deforestation detection, namely, Early Fusion (EF), Siamese Network (SN), and Convolutional Support Vector Machine (CSVM) as well as Support Vector Machine (SVM), used as the baseline. The target areas are two regions with different deforestation patterns: the Amazon and Cerrado biomes in Brazil. The experiments used two co-registered Landsat 8 images acquired at different dates. The strategies based on Deep Learning achieved the best performance in our analysis in comparison with the baseline, with SN and EF superior to CSVM and SVM. In the same way, a reduction of the salt-and-pepper effect in the generated probabilistic change maps was noticed as the number of training samples increased. Finally, the work assesses how the methods can reduce the time invested in the visual inspection of deforested areas.