Detection of quasi-circular vegetation community patches using circular hough transform based on ZY-3 satellite image in the Yellow River Delta, China

Recently some types of quasi-circular patchy vegetations have been found and proved by high spatial resolution satellite remote sensing images and field investigations in the Yellow River Delta. In order to facilitate the monitoring of vegetation extension and quantify the mechanism of vegetation patch succession, there is a clear need for accurate and economical of detecting the vegetation patches. The main objective of this paper is to detect the quasi-circular vegetation patches from ZY-3 satellite image using Circular Hough Transform (CHT) method. The results show that the quasi-circular vegetation patches could be detected well using ZY-3 panchromatic image (The detection accuracy of the quasi-circular vegetation patches was 64.1%) but some constraint had been exposed.