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MULTISCALE IMAGES IN FORESTRY 
Király, Géza 
Departmental Engineer, PhD Student 
University of Sopron, Department of Surveying and Remote Sensing, H-9400 Sopron, Hungary 
email: kige@efe.hu 
Commission VII, Working Group 4 
KEY WORDS: Classification, Texture, Ortophoto, DTM, Accuracy, Forest Inventory, GIS. 
ABSTRACT: 
The paper presents forest classifications based on different sources. The complementary and comparing forests classification of 
Landsat TM, Spot Pan and scanned aerial photographic images are presented. It shows a new way of classification which the large scale 
texture and some other, non-imaging data (e.g. digital terrain model (DTM)) are involved in. The results of the different-scale 
classifications are combined, put to geographical information system (GIS), and analysed from the forestry point of view. The 
classification procedures are presented on a test area, in Hungary with a comparison with traditional methods. The extracted stands’ 
parameters are compared with the traditional forest inventory data. The paper concludes with an overall evaluation of the method, and 
gives some ideas on using it in the forestry practice. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Recently the Geographical Information Systems in forestry have 
become more and more important. The fast changes of the 
circumstances have put a significant emphasis on remote sensing 
and GIS. The social expectations have been changed from the 
timber production to the multipurpose forest functions. The main 
purposes of Remote Sensing in forestry are determining the 
stands’ parameters for inventories and detecting the changes for 
better forest plans for the community. In this paper I'm only 
engaged in the forest stands’ parameters. 
There are two ways of getting better results. One is using better 
and better sources, such as hyper-spectral cameras, the other is 
developing more sophisticated methods, based on the same old 
sources. The first one involves new methods too, of course. Due 
to limited possibilities, I applied the latter way. 
2. THE TEST AREA 
The representative test areas are situated beside Sopron, at the 
western board of Hungary (Figure 1), called the Mountainous 
Region of Sopron. 
  
Figure 1: The situation of the test area. 
These area is a medium-height mountains, the altitude of the area 
is between 200 and 560 meter. The annual mean temperature is 
9.0-9.5 °C, the annual precipitation is about 700 mm. The main 
soil type is brown forest soils, especially acidic, non-podzolic 
brown forest soils. The natural vegetation of the area is 
submontane oak-hornbeam forests and submontane beech 
forests. The present forests are cultivated mixed forests, with a 
lot of coniferous species, not naturally, but very diverse, a good 
area for testing classification methods. Nowadays there are 
serious woodborer disasters in spruce stands. Some select cutting 
stands are represented too. The overall impression of the region 
is very diverse, because our ancestors thought that a wide variety 
would mean better forests. 
3. THE APPLIED DATA 
I used a Landsat TM, a SPOT Pan and a scanned aerial images in 
my investigations. The Landsat TM - O ESA (1991), distributed 
by EURIMAGE, FOMI RSC - was from 5® of October, 1991, 
has a 25 m ground resolution. The SPOT image - © CNES 
(1995), distributed by SPOT IMAGE, FOMI RSC - was made 
on 11” of august, 1995, with 10 m ground resolution. There were 
two series of aerial photographs. The first series was a false 
colour infrared contact copy at scale 1:31°580 approximately, 
made on 29" of September 1991, and was scanned with 300 dpi- 
true colour RGB (approx. 2.67 m ground resolution)(P1) and the 
other series was a false colour infrared contact copy at a scale 
1:8°300, scanned with 300 dpi-true colour RGB, too (approx. 
0.7 m ground resolution)(P2). I used a digital topographic map at 
a scale 1:50'000, named DTA-50 - € MH TÉHI, a digital forest 
base map (DFBM) at a scale 1:10°000 - © AESZ - DigiTerra 
Eng. Office, the National Forest Database (NFDB) - © AESZ, 
and a 10m-10m grid base digital terrain model, named DDM-10 - 
© MH TÉHI. 
International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXII, Part 7, Budapest, 1998 365