Vineyard identification in an oak woodland landscape with airborne digital camera imagery

Using airborne multispectral digital camera imagery, we compared a number of feature combination techniques in image classification to distinguish vineyard from non-vineyard land-cover types in northern California. Image processing techniques were applied to raw images to generate feature images including grey level co-occurrence based texture measures, low pass and Laplacian filtering results, Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization, principal components, and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). We used the maximum likelihood classifier for image classification. Accuracy assessment is performed using digitized boundaries of the vineyard blocks. The most successful classification as determined by t-tests of the Kappa coefficients was achieved based on the use of a texture image of homogeneity obtained from the near infrared image band, NDVI and brightness generated through orthogonalization analysis. This method averaged an overall accuracy of 81 per cent for six frames of images tested. With post-classification morphological processing (clumping and sieving) the overall accuracy was significantly increased to 87 per cent (with a confidence level of 0.99).