Tree cover extraction from 50 cm worldview2 imagery: A comparison of image processing techniques

High resolution remote sensing is a valuable tool for quantifying the distribution and density of trees with applications ranging from forest inventory, mapping urban parklands to understanding impacts on soil nutrient and carbon dynamics in farming land. The present study aims to compare the accuracy of different remote sensing techniques for delineating the tree cover in 50 cm resolution WorldView2 imagery of farmland. An image of farmland comprising pastures, remnant vegetation and woodland was initially classified into six classes, namely tree cover, bare soil, rock outcrop, natural pasture, degraded pasture and water body using different techniques. Pixel based classification based on all four available wavebands, were tested and an overall classification accuracy of 96.8% and 72.9 % were achieved for supervised and unsupervised techniques. Object based segmentation and subsequent classification yielded an improved overall classification accuracy of 98.3%. Addition of a fifth NDVI layer to the available wavebands did improve the accuracy but not significantly (98.1%, approx 1.3%). In addition to the improvements in overall classification accuracy, a visual inspections of results from the different methods indicated the object based method to yield a more `realistic´ result, avoiding the `salt and pepper´ effects apparent in the pixel-based methods. Overall, object based classification hence is considered more suitable for tree cover extraction from high resolution images.