Landscape tree species recognition using RedEdge-MX: Suitability analysis of two different texture extraction forms under MLC and RF supervision

Abstract

The size of the texture extraction window impacts image tree species classification, and the determination of the optimal texture extraction window requires the supervision of a specific classifier for accuracy. Therefore, it is necessary to analyse which kind of classifier is more suitable and should be to choose. In this study, we extracted eight types of textures, namely mean, variance, homogeneity, contrast, dissimilarity, entropy, second moment and correlation, changed the window size by gradient increase and used maximum likelihood classification (MLC) and random forest (RF) to supervise and determine their optimal extraction windows, respectively. Finally, the optimised time consumption and classification accuracy for tree species classification was identified. The time consumption of MLC was significantly less than that of RF; however, neither was very long; for most textures, the optimal texture extraction window determined by MLC supervision was larger than that determined by RF supervision; in the classification of most feature sets, the overall accuracy obtained by MLC was less than that of RF. Because the time consumption of the texture extraction was much greater than that of the image classification, the comprehensive trade-off indicates that using RF supervision to determine the optimal window for texture extraction was more conducive to tree species recognition.