Statistical texture analysis of forest areas from very high spatial resolution satellite images

Abstract

Aerospace images with a spatial resolution of less than 1 m are actively used by regional services to obtain and update information about various environmental objects. Considerable efforts are being devoted to the development of remote sensing methods for forest areas. The structure of the forest canopy depends on various parameters, most of which are determined by ground-based methods during forest management works. Remote sensing methods for assessing the structural parameters of forest stands are based on texture analysis of panchromatic and multispectral images. A statistical approach is often used to extract texture features. The basis of this approach is the description of the distributions characterizing the mutual arrangement of image pixels in grayscale. This paper compares the effectiveness of matrix based statistical methods for extracting textural features for solving the problem of classifying various natural and manmade objects, as well as structures of the forest canopy. We consider statistics of various orders based on estimates of the distributions of gray levels, as well as the mutual occurrence, frequency, difference and structuring of gray levels. The results of assessing the informativeness of statistical textural characteristics in determining various structures of the forest canopy are presented. Dependences of the classification results on the choice of distribution parameters are determined. For the quantitative validation of the results obtained, data from ground surveys and expert visual classification of very high resolution WorldView-2 images of the territories of Savvatyevkoe and Bronnitskoe forestries are used.