Jittered Match Windows Voting for Tree Top Positions in Aerial Photographs

Templates derived from an optical tree crown model and from the geometry at image acquisition have been used with good results in the estimation of individual spruce tree top positions in aerial photographs. The method can nd tree tops from a wide range of viewing angles including extreme oo-nadir views, but a requirement has been that the total expected number of trees is known in advance. A new extension of the template matching technique is proposed in which multiple different match windows are used to produce several templates from the same ray{traced base image. The resulting templates produce slightly diierent match results which are used in a voting scheme to produce match candidates with a quality score which better than a single template correlation co-eecient can eliminate the need to know a priori the number of trees to be found.