Large Scale Forest Parameter Estimation Through a Deep Learning-Based Fusion of Sentinel-2 and Tandem-X Data

The estimation of forest parameters, such as canopy height model (CHM) and above ground biomass (AGB), is of utmost importance for forest monitoring, carbon-cycle modelling, disturbance analysis, resource inventorying and natural disaster prevention. In this work, we profit from the most recent advancements in deep learning research to propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for frequent forest parameter estimation at large scale. Our technique consists of a fully convolutional, multi-modal framework, which works on a single set of complementary multi-spectral and interferometric SAR data, acquired by ESA's Sentinel-2 and DLR's TanDEM-X missions, respectively. The regression performance of our framework has been tested over four tropical forest test sites in Gabon, Africa. The estimation of CHM shows promising early results when compared to state-of-the-art methods and has the advantage of requiring only a single input image pair instead of a longer time-series, as commonly done for state-of-the-art model-based techniques.