A method for estimating forest carbon storage distribution density via artificial intelligence generated content model

Forest is the most significant land-based carbon storage mechanism. The forest carbon sink can effectively decrease the atmospheric CO2 concentration and mitigate climate change. Remote sensing estimation not only ensures high accuracy of data, but also enables large-scale area observation. Optical images provide the possibility for long-term monitoring, which is a potential issue in the future carbon storage estimation research. We chose Huize County, Qujing City, Yunnan Province, China as the study area, took GF-1 WFV satellite image as the data, introduced the KD-VGG module to extract the initial features, and proposed the improved implicit diffusion model (IIDM). The results showed that: (1) The VGG-19 module after knowledge distillation can realize the initial feature extraction, reduce the inference time and improve the accuracy in the case of reducing the number of model parameters. (2) The Attention + MLP module was added for feature fusion to obtain the relationship between global and local features and realized the restoration of high-fidelity images in the continuous scale range. (3) The IIDM model proposed in this paper had the highest estimation accuracy, with RMSE of 28.68, which was 13.16 higher than that of the regression model, about 31.45%. In the estimation of carbon storage, the generative model can extract deeper features, and its performance was significantly better than other models. It demonstrated the feasibility of artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) in the field of quantitative remote sensing and provided valuable insights for the study of carbon neutralization effect. By combining the actual characteristics of the forest, the regional carbon storage estimation with a resolution of 16-meter was utilized to provide a significant theoretical basis for the formulation of forest carbon sink regulation.