Learning to Predict Aboveground Biomass from RGB Images with 3D Synthetic Scenes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel learning-based method to estimate aboveground biomass from a single RGB image using synthetic 3D forest scenes, achieving accurate results and enabling scalable forest monitoring.

Contribution

It is the first approach to directly estimate aboveground biomass from a single RGB image, leveraging synthetic datasets and dense prediction techniques.

Findings

Median AGB estimation error of 1.22 kg/m^2 on synthetic data

Median AGB estimation error of 1.94 kg/m^2 on real images

First method to estimate AGB directly from RGB images

Abstract

Forests play a critical role in global ecosystems by supporting biodiversity and mitigating climate change via carbon sequestration. Accurate aboveground biomass (AGB) estimation is essential for assessing carbon storage and wildfire fuel loads, yet traditional methods rely on labor-intensive field measurements or remote sensing approaches with significant limitations in dense vegetation. In this work, we propose a novel learning-based method for estimating AGB from a single ground-based RGB image. We frame this as a dense prediction task, introducing AGB density maps, where each pixel represents tree biomass normalized by the plot area and each tree's image area. We leverage the recently introduced synthetic 3D SPREAD dataset, which provides realistic forest scenes with per-image tree attributes (height, trunk and canopy diameter) and instance segmentation masks. Using these assets, we compute AGB via allometric equations and train a model to predict AGB density maps, integrating them to recover the AGB estimate for the captured scene. Our approach achieves a median AGB estimation error of 1.22 kg/m^2 on held-out SPREAD data and 1.94 kg/m^2 on a real-image dataset. To our knowledge, this is the first method to estimate aboveground biomass directly from a single RGB image, opening up the possibility for a scalable, interpretable, and cost-effective solution for forest monitoring, while also enabling broader participation through citizen science initiatives.