Enhancement of tree canopy cover for the mapping of forest from the Sentinel-2 imagery

Abstract

A forest is a piece of land dominated by trees; factors like tree density, tree height, canopy cover, land use, and ecological function discriminate different forest types. The canopy cover is instrumental in the identification of forest in the satellite imagery. Multispectral satellite imageries are very useful in feature highlighting. The combination of bands is a powerful tool not only to enhance some earth features but also to suppress others. In our study, a novel index is proposed for the delineation of tree canopy using Sentinel-2 multispectral imagery. A new simple vegetation ratio is proposed for the extraction of the vegetated areas including forest, farms, and other green lands, the existing normalized difference built-up index is modified, and an open surface water index is utilized to formulate a novel tree canopy cover index for the identification of tree canopy.