Woody vegetation landscape features, such as hedges, tree patches, and riparian vegetation, are important elements of landscape and biotic diversity. For the reason that biodiversity loss is one of the major ecological problems in the EU, it is necessary to establish efficient workflows for the registration and monitoring of woody vegetation landscape features. In the paper, we propose and evaluate a methodology for automated detection of changes in woody vegetation landscape features from a digital orthophoto (DOP). We demonstrate its ability to capture most of the actual changes in the field and thereby provide valuable support for more efficient maintenance of landscape feature layers, which is important for the shaping of future environmental policies. While the most reliable source for vegetation cover mapping is a combination of LiDAR and high-resolution imagery, it can be prohibitively expensive for continuous updates. The DOP from cyclic aerial photography presents an alternative source of up-to-date information for tracking woody vegetation landscape features in-between LiDAR recordings. The proposed methodology uses a segmentation neural network, which is trained with the latest DOP against the last known ground truth as the target. The output is a layer of detected changes, which are validated by the user before being used to update the woody vegetation landscape feature layer. The methodology was tested using the data of a typical traditional Central European cultural landscape, Goričko, in north-eastern Slovenia. The achieved $F_1$ of per-pixel segmentation was 83.5% and 77.1% for two- and five-year differences between the LiDAR-based reference and the DOP, respectively. The validation of the proposed changes at a minimum area threshold of 100 m² and a minimum area percentage threshold of 20% showed that the model achieved recall close to 90%.

This paper introduces a new method for the region segmentation of images. The approach is based on the raster-scan paradigm and builds the segments incrementally. The pixels are processed in the raster-scan order, while the construction of the segments is based on a distance metric in regard to the already segmented pixels in the neighbourhood. The segmentation procedure operates in linear time according to the total number of pixels. The proposed method, named the RSM (raster-scan segmentation method), was tested on selected images from the popular benchmark datasets MS COCO and DIV2K. The experimental results indicate that our method successfully extracts regions with similar pixel values. Furthermore, a comparison with two of the well-known segmentation methods—Watershed and DBSCAN—demonstrates that the proposed approach is superior in regard to efficiency while yielding visually similar results.