Tropical forest monitoring in Tanzania

Tropical forest monitoring in Tanzania is challenging due to frequent, partial cloud cover. Also, there are large seasonal variations, due to the rain seasons and dry periods. This means that detecting forest changes simply by classifying two satellite images taken a few years apart, and compute the difference, will not work well in practice.

We propose to use a hidden Markow model approach to address these and other challenges in order to do forest mapping and forest change detection. The method is based on using a time series of images; the more images, the better.