Open-Canopy: Towards Very High Resolution Forest Monitoring

Fajwel Fogel, Yohann PERRON, Nikola Besic, Laurent Saint-Andre, Agnès Pellissier-Tanon, Martin Schwartz, Thomas Boudras, Ibrahim Fayad, Alexandre d'Aspremont, Loic Landrieu, Philippe CIAIS

Abstract: Estimating canopy height and its changes at meter resolution from satellite imagery is a significant challenge in computer vision 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 resolution satellite imagery and aerial LiDAR data. Additionally, we present Open-Canopy-Δ, a benchmark for canopy height change detection between images from different years at tree level-a challenging 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 https://github.com/fajwel/Open-Canopy.