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How to Access eCognition Oil Palm Application and eCognition Essentials

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Trimble® eCognition® is enabling free access to eCognition Essentials 1.3 and Oil Palm Application 1.3 and 2.0. All our users with valid eCognition Developer and eCognition Architect licenses can use these applications free of charge.

What can eCognition Essentials and Oil Palm Application be used for?

Trimble eCognition Essentials 1.3 is a stand-alone application built on eCognition software technology that covers all steps of sample-based image analysis by applying predefined and structured rules to image analysis tasks. It allows you to classify your imagery whether it is acquired by drone or by satellite into a user-defined set of classes based on the supervised classification approach and export your classification as a vector.

The Trimble eCognition Oil Palm Application offers the possibility to automatically detect single palm trees in a plantation using the typical leaf structure to identify individual trees. The input is the orthophoto and the digital surface model. The outputs are GNSS coordinates of each palm tree, palm height, crown size, and health. Additionally, the application offers the possibility to automatically detect single palm trees in a plantation using the typical leaf structure to identify individual trees. Oil Palm Application 1.3 is based on template matching and Oil Palm Application 2.0 is based on deep learning technology.

How do I access eCognition Essentials and eCognition Oil Palm Application?

Trimble eCognition Oil Palm Application, versions 1.3 and 2.0, and eCognition Essentials 1.3 are based on eCognition rulesets.

Users with a valid eCognition Developer license can download and use all published applications and modify the solutions as the rulesets are not encrypted.

Users with a valid eCognition Architect license can download eCognition Oil Palm Application 1.3 and eCognition Essentials 1.3. They can use the full functionality of both applications through a simple user interface. eCognition Architect license does not allow ruleset access and modification.

eCognition Oil Palm Application 1.3 and eCognition Essentials 1.3
(eCognition Developer or eCognition Architect license required)

In the attached files, you will find zipped files with everything you need to get Oil Palm Application 1.3 and eCognition Essentials 1.3 running in eCognition Developer or eCognition Architect.

To get started, follow these steps:

  1. Download and unzip the files below
    • eCognition Essentials 1.3 (download here)
    • eCognition Oil Palm Application 1.3 (download here)
  2. Open eCognition Developer or eCognition Architect
  3. In the menu bar select Architect > Open Action Library
    • For Essentials: select folder ActionLibrary_dark or ActionLibrary_light
    • For Oil Palm Application: select folder ActionLibrary_dark or ActionLibrary_light

eCognition Oil Palm Application 2.0 (eCognition Developer license required)

For Oil Palm Application 2.0, only a ruleset is available, including a deep learning model for palm tree identification.

To get started, follow these steps:

  1. Download and unzip the file below
    • eCognition Oil Palm Application 2.0 (download here)
  2. In the installation folder of eCognition Developer create a folder web_rulesets, the path to the folder should be {InstallDir}\bin\web_rulesets
  3. Copy folder OilPalm to the installation folder of eCognition Developer {InstallDir}\bin\web_rulesets
  4. Start eCognition Developer and load the ruleset file opa.dcp
  5. Load your orthophoto, digital surface model. and a vector that defines the area of interest

The ruleset is relatively complex, however, if you only want to find palm trees using the deep learning model, execute the following part of the ruleset: do/ActionPreprocessing/Execute. The results can be visualized in the View Settings > Thematic Layers.