Open-Canopy: Towards Very High Resolution Forest Monitoring
Résumé
Estimating canopy height and its changes at meter resolution from satellite imagery remains a challenging computer vision task with critical environmental applications. However, the lack of open-access datasets at this resolution hinders the reproducibility and evaluation of models. We introduce Open-Canopy, the first open-access, country-scale benchmark for very high-resolution (1.5 m) canopy height estimation, covering over 87,000 km² across France with 1.5 m panchromatic resolution satellite imagery and aerial LiDAR data. Additionally, we present Open-Canopy-$\Delta$, a benchmark for canopy height reduction detection between images from different years at tree level---a difficult task for current computer vision models. We evaluate state-of-the-art architectures on these benchmarks, highlighting significant challenges and opportunities for improvement. Our datasets and code are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/fajwel/Open-Canopy}.