Robust path opening versus path opening for the detection of hedgerows in rural landscapes

The automatic detection of hedgerows in very high resolution remote sensing images is addressed in this paper. In particular, the use of advanced morphological filters, such as path operators, is proposed. Conventional path openings have been already proposed in the literature to discriminate between forest objects and hedge objects in very high resolution optical images. They have shown greater flexibility with respect to geodesic openings. However, path operators are sensitive to noise and in practical situations they are likely to produce missed detections. In particular, path operators are unable to extract long hedgerows as a single object. In order to tackle this limitation, robust path openings are investigated in this work. In the experimental results, robust path opening shows superior performances for the detection of hedgerows.