Exploitation of spectral and temporal information for mapping plant species in a former industrial site

Abstract

Characterization and seasonal (periodic) monitoring of plant species distribution in the context of former industrial activity is crucial to assess long-term anthropogenic footprint on vegetated area. Species discrimination has shown promising results using both HyperSpectral (HS) and MultiSpectral (MS) images. Airborne HS instruments enable high spatial and spectral resolution imagery while time series of satellite MS images provide high temporal resolution and phenological information. This paper aims to compare supervised classification results obtained with non-parametric (Random Forest, RF, Support Vector Machine, SVM) and parametric methods (Regularized Logistic Regression, RLR) applied on both kinds of images acquired on an industrial brownfield. The studied site is a complex vegetated environment due to species diversity: 8 dominant species are retained. The performance obtained by preliminary feature selection based on principal component analysis and vegetation indices, to improve separability of spectral or temporal information according to species, is analysed. The best performance is obtained by RLR method applied on HS data without feature selection (global accuracy of 93 %). Feature selection is found to be a necessary step to perform classification with time series of MS images. Species that are difficult to distinguish from the HS image, namely Salix and Populus, are well separated using Sentinel-2 images (precision around 70%).