Counting oil palms is one of those jobs everyone hates.
If you've ever done it manually, you know: you open the orthomosaic in QGIS, create a point layer, and start clicking. One palm at a time. For a 100-hectare estate with ~25,000 palms, that's days of clicking and your accuracy drops off a cliff by hour two. Hire someone to do it and you'll pay them to be bored and make mistakes.
I've spent the last few years doing palm census work for plantations here in Malaysia, and I got tired of this too. So I built the tool I always wanted.
Meet Palm Counter Pro
Palm Counter Pro is a desktop application that automatically detects and counts oil palm trees from drone (UAV) orthomosaic imagery. You give it an orthophoto, it gives you every palm as a georeferenced point — with crown delineation, per-palm statistics, and a full report. And because it was built for real plantation health monitoring, it goes one step further: an optional module predicts Ganoderma (basal stem rot) infection risk per palm from multispectral features.
No cloud subscription. No per-image fees. No internet needed. It runs on your own Windows PC, on your own data.
What It Does
- ✓Automatic detectionYOLO-based palm crown detection from RGB orthomosaic — even in mature, overlapping canopy. Confidence & IoU fully adjustable.
- ✓Every palm, georeferencedOutputs a GeoPackage (GPKG) point layer with real-world coordinates, ready for QGIS/ArcGIS.
- ✓Crown delineationGenerates crown circles and per-palm histograms for every detected palm.
- ✓Handles big filesTiled processing for large orthomosaics — no RAM choke, no size limits.
- ✓GPU acceleratedRuns on NVIDIA GPUs (CUDA) with batch-size control — a 100 ha estate in minutes, not days.
- ✓Runs 100% offlineYour plantation data never leaves your computer.
How It Works — 3 Steps
- Load your orthomosaicGeoTIFF from Agisoft Metashape, Pix4D, DJI Terra, WebODM — any of them.
- Press StartThe engine tiles the image, detects palm crowns, and filters false positives automatically.
- ExportPalm points CSV, statistics report, and annotated map — all generated for you.
Typical processing time: under 5 minutes for a 100-hectare estate on a normal office PC.
Why Not Just Count Manually?
I ran the comparison on a real estate:
| Method | Time | Cost | Accuracy after hour 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manual clicking | 3–5 days | Staff time × days | Drops fast (fatigue) |
| Palm Counter Pro | ~5 min | One-time license | Consistent across the whole estate |
The tool doesn't get tired on palm number 18,000. It counts block 40 with the same consistency as block 1.
Who It's For
- Estate managersCensus, replanting verification, density audits.
- GIS vendors & survey companiesDeliver palm census as a service without hiring clickers.
- Agronomists & researchersStand count trials, canopy studies.
- SmallholdersKnow exactly how many palms you own.
Technical Specs
- Input: GeoTIFF orthomosaic (RGB), any CRS, 2–10 cm/px recommended — from Agisoft Metashape, Pix4D, DJI Terra, WebODM
- Detection engine: YOLO (.pt or .onnx model), adjustable confidence & IoU, global NMS, RGB band mapping
- Output: GeoPackage (GPKG) palm points · crown circles · per-palm histograms · optional multispectral feature extraction
- Bonus module: XGBoost-based Ganoderma (basal stem rot) infection prediction from multispectral features
- Platform: Windows 10/11 · NVIDIA GPU recommended (CUDA) · 8 GB RAM minimum
- No installation headaches: single .exe, no Python, no dependencies
Pricing
For companies: multi-seat and enterprise licensing available. I'll send a proper quotation for your PO process.
Company purchase? Ask for a formal quotation — PO and bank transfer accepted.
If it can handle Malaysian oil palm estates, it can handle yours.