Tree Crown Density Analysis from Hyperspectral Image

Abstract

A study was conducted to investigate whether reflectance data of hyperspectral image of an area could be used to extract related physical features to produce mapping of vegetation density. This paper explains on estimating percentage of vegetation coverage based on Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Image segmentation based on thresholding was used to separate different features of the land entities like soil, water and road. From here, NDVI values can be integrated for further segmenting the vegetation features. The colour segmentation method is then able to classify the vegetation according to their density level, which can be used to determine tree crown density. Test conducted towards a hyperspectral image shows that different density level can be extracted, where it contains about 7.5% high level tree crown density, 1.8% medium crown density and 5% low. More tests need to be conducted in order to proof the workability of the developed algorithm in analysing hyperspectral images from tree crown density mapping.